[vtkusers] string compare bug?

[Kevin Wright]

I just tracked down what looks like an odd bug, and I was wondering if 
anyone out there had any insight.

I'm using a vtkPolyDataReader object to field incoming polydata definitions 
through a socket.  I do this by reading the polydata from the socket into a 
string, then using the input string in the vtkDataReader.

Everything generally worked fine, except in some cases the pipeline would 
not update when new data came down the socket.  Eventually I tracked the 
problem down to vtkDataReader::SetInputString which, before assigning the 
string, does a string compare between the old and new string.

When the new and old datasets were very similar (usually identical 
geometry, slightly changed scalar values) the strncmp would return a 
match.  The string length was correct, and once the string compare was 
removed, everything worked fine.

I'm working on a Windows 2000 machine with VC++ 6.0.  I'm about to try the 
same thing on IRIX and Linux to see what happens, but I was wondering:

1. Has anyone seen this kind of behavior before?
2. Should the string compare really be there at all, given that these 
strings could be very long?

Regards,
Kevin.