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Well you don't have to make copies of strings to slice them, just ask strtok! </s>

If you wanted to slice at an arbitrary point, then you would either have to lose some data in the original string, move or copy the original string to make space for the extra delimiter/null character, or have set up the string ahead of time to contain the delimiter in the desired position. If you are using strtok.

There is also the mangle-use-repair choice. I've done that with pathnames for creating nested directories.

C programmers are expected to make the best choice based on the situation. The various choices trade off memory usage, CPU usage, source code readability, and program correctness.

> There is also the mangle-use-repair choice.

Which is problematic for thread safety and depending on the source of the string (constant) may not be possible.

It's not problematic. C programmers are expected to avoid screwing that up. C is a full-power language.

If available, strdupa() would be a fine way to get a suitable local copy of the string. Commonly though, the programmer knows that there will not be threads and can make the string non-constant.

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