Should there be a difference between an empty BSTR and a NULL BSTR?

Question

When maintaining a COM interface should an empty BSTR be treated the same way as NULL? In other words should these two function calls produce the same result?

 // Empty BSTR
 CComBSTR empty(L""); // Or SysAllocString(L"")
 someObj->Foo(empty);

 // NULL BSTR
 someObj->Foo(NULL);     

Lapierre

Answer 1

Yes - a NULL BSTR is the same as an empty one. I remember we had all sorts of bugs that were uncovered when we switched from VS6 to 2003 - the CComBSTR class had a change to the default constructor that allocated it using NULL rather than an empty string. This happens when you for example treat a BSTR as a regular C style string and pass it to some function like strlen, or try to initialise a std::string with it.

Eric Lippert discusses BSTR's in great detail in Eric's Complete Guide To BSTR Semantics:

Let me list the differences first and then discuss each point in excruciating detail.

1. A BSTR must have identical semantics for NULL and for "". A PWSZ frequently has different semantics for those.

2. A BSTR must be allocated and freed with the SysAlloc* family of functions. A PWSZ can be an automatic-storage buffer from the stack or allocated with malloc, new, LocalAlloc or any other memory allocator.

3. A BSTR is of fixed length. A PWSZ may be of any length, limited only by the amount of valid memory in its buffer.

4. A BSTR always points to the first valid character in the buffer. A PWSZ may be a pointer to the middle or end of a string buffer.

5. When allocating an n-byte BSTR you have room for n/2 wide characters. When you allocate n bytes for a PWSZ you can store n / 2 - 1 characters -- you have to leave room for the null.

6. A BSTR may contain any Unicode data including the zero character. A PWSZ never contains the zero character except as an end-of-string marker. Both a BSTR and a PWSZ always have a zero character after their last valid character, but in a BSTR a valid character may be a zero character.

7. A BSTR may actually contain an odd number of bytes -- it may be used for moving binary data around. A PWSZ is almost always an even number of bytes and used only for storing Unicode strings.

Analects

On the gripping hand---I've experienced MSXML code that doesn't obey the NULL == empty rule, and exhibits different behaviour for the two. But that was 5 years ago (MSXML 3, if I remember right), and hopefully they've fixed this by now. :-) – Readymix

.NET interops don't obey the rules either - they marshal "" to String.Empty and NULL to null. – Alkaloid

Technically they differ. Its up to the implementations whether they handle nulls as empty strings or not. See msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc237580.aspx – Greaser

Answer 2

The easiest way to handle this dilemma is to use CComBSTR and check for .Length() to be zero. That works for both empty and NULL values.

However, keep in mind, empty BSTR must be released or there will be a memory leak. I saw some of those recently in other's code. Quite hard to find, if you are not looking carefully.

Garofalo