x86 Assembly: strcpy Procedure

Use MASM for Visual C++ Express Edition 2005 to compile this procedure.

This procedure, strcpy_asm, copies a C-string from the source to the destination and returns a pointer to the end of the destination so that another string can be concatenated. For Unicode strings see wcscpy_asm.

The default behavior of strcpy is to return the destination buffer but it is much more useful to return the end of the text in the destination buffer.

TITLE 'extern "C" char * strcpy_asm(char *destination, const char *source);'

.386P

.model FLAT

PUBLIC	_strcpy_asm

_TEXT	SEGMENT
_strcpy_asm PROC NEAR

	mov  edx, DWORD PTR [esp+8] ; source
	mov  cl, BYTE PTR [edx]
	test cl, cl
	mov  eax, DWORD PTR [esp+4] ; destination
	je   SHORT label2

label1:

	mov  BYTE PTR [eax], cl
	mov  cl, BYTE PTR [edx+1]
	inc  eax
	inc  edx
	test cl, cl
	jne  SHORT label1

label2:

	mov  BYTE PTR [eax], 0

	ret  0
	
_strcpy_asm ENDP
_TEXT	ENDS
END

This example C++ code uses this function.

#include <stdlib.h>

extern "C" char * strcpy_asm(char *destination, const char *source);

char str[100], *end;
int length;

end = strcpy_asm(str, "How ");
end = strcpy_asm(end, "now ");
end = strcpy_asm(end, "brown ");
end = strcpy_asm(end, "cow!");

length = end - str;

// or simply

length = strcpy_asm(strcpy_asm(strcpy_asm(strcpy_asm(str, "How "), "now "), "brown "), "cow!") - str;

// str == "How now brown cow!"
// length == 18

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