Test Data Generation for C Programs with String-Handling Functions

There are many test generation methods, but few of them consider the character strings. This paper proposes a method to generate test data for C programs with character strings and character string function calls, which is based on path oriented testing. Each character variable is viewed as an integer variable with the restriction that the value should be between 0 and 255. A character string is viewed as an array of characters with a predefined fixed length. Many commonly used character library functions are modeled by formulae in predicate logic with assignment statements. The model is then used to replace the function call in the program path, which will be solved by a path analysis tool to generate the test data. A prototype tool called StrGen is developed to illustrate the feasibility of this method. The results of some examples also show that this method is feasible and very efficient.