Writing concise code in C - c

Question

strcat(msg, ": ");
strcat(msg, buf);
Is there a way to do this in one line? I want to make my code cleaner and reduce clutter

Answer 1

Instead of doing multiple concatenations, try creating a formatted string. Try something like this:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
int main()
{
char *before_colon = "Text before colon";
char *after_colon = "Text after colon";
// Make a string that is the size of both formatted strings, plus a
// character for the space, colon, and null character.
char final_string[strlen(before_colon) + strlen(after_colon) + 3];
// This works just like any other C formatted function (i.e printf, scanf)
sprintf(final_string, "%s: %s", before_colon, after_colon);
printf("%s\n", final_string);
}
output:
Text before colon: Text after colon

Answer 2

Here's a modified code of Charlie Sale with its own function to count characters in the string. Thus, StrLen is called in array declaration.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
int StrLen(char* PtrFirstChar)
{
int n = 0;
while(*(PtrFirstChar++)) // will evaluate to FALSE when '\0' reached
n++;
return n;
}
int main()
{
char *before_colon = "Text before colon";
char *after_colon = "Text after colon";
// Make a string that is the size of both formatted strings, plus a
// character for the space, colon, and null character.
char final_string[StrLen(before_colon) + StrLen(after_colon) + 3];
// This works just like any other C formatted function (i.e printf, scanf)
sprintf(final_string, "%s: %s", before_colon, after_colon);
printf("%s\n", final_string);
}

Answer 3

You could write your own variant of strcat!
I'm going to use strncat as a basis because strcat is a really bad idea:
#include <stddef.h> /* for size_t */
#include <stdarg.h> /* for va_* */
char *
mstrncat(char *d, size_t maxlen, ...)
{
va_list ap;
va_start(ap, maxlen);
char *ret = d;
/* Fast-forward */
for (; *d && maxlen; ++d, --maxlen);
/* Reserve a space for the terminator */
if (maxlen)
--maxlen;
const char *p;
/* Concatenate parameters one by one */
while (maxlen && (p = va_arg(ap, const char *))) {
while (*p && maxlen--)
*d++ = *p++;
}
/* Terminate the string */
*d = 0;
va_end(ap);
return ret;
}
You can use it like this:
#include <stdio.h>
int
main()
{
char test[128]="test";
mstrncat(test, sizeof(test), "1", "two", "3", NULL);
puts(test);
return 0;
}