finding character in string C language

Question

I am searching a character at first occurence in string using the following code. But it is taking some time when the character is too long or the character that I am searching is at far extent, which delays other operations. How could I tackle this problem. The code is below here.

Note: attrPtr is a char * which holds a reference to a string containing '"' character at far extent.

int position = 0;

char qolon = '"';//character to search

while (*(attrPtr + position++) != qolon);

char* attrValue = NULL;

attrValue = (char*)malloc(position * sizeof(char));

strncpy(attrValue, attrPtr, position-1);

Answer 1

strchr will usually be somewhat faster. Also, you need to check for the NUL terminator, which strchr will handle for you.

char *quotPtr = strchr(attrPtr, qolon);
if(quotPtr == NULL)
{
  ... // Handle error
}
int position = quotPtr - attrPtr;
char* attrValue = (char*) malloc((position + 1) * sizeof(char));
memcpy(attrValue, attrPtr, position);
attrValue[position] = '';

I haven't tested, though.

EDIT: Fix off-by-one.