I've been a little frusterated with gdb when debugging some software.. For one, it doesn't seem smart enough to realize that if you want to print the value of an STL string in C++, you usually just want to print the characters contained in the string; instead, it prints the object information with its members, etc.. I've gotten into the habit of typing something like "print myString.c_str()" in gdb so that it only prints the characters in the string.

Additionally, I've encountered a lot of situations where gdb doesn't even seem to print the correct value of an STL string. I'll print the value of a string in gdb and get garbage, but the program will behave as if that's not the value of the string.

It's as if gdb isn't quite smart enough or up to par for C++. I've downloaded and installed other debuggers (i.e., DDD & kdbg), only to find out that they're simply wrappers around gdb, which doesn't really help; gdb still exhibits the same problems. Are there any debuggers for Linux for debugging C++ that are a little more intuitive and smarter?

Seriously though GDB does show you the contents of the string, in excruciating detail, and the value you're interested in is typically the last part. The bit in quotes, that is the content. If you use a wrapper like kdbg then it breaks the output down to show you the actual content.

I think it really depends on what people are looking for in a debugger. gdb is very powerful and in my experience using the c_str() or data() doesn't work, I think it is to do with how the data is dynamically allocated within the string.

But if your only problem is that the display of string data isn't pretty then I doubt that is a real problem. Learn to use it. Play with the breakpoints, watchpoint, and run little scripts at a breakpoint.

graeme.