The value you wrote out is MAX_PATH
bytes wide, regardless of how long the path really is. Thus you probably have a lot of non-printing characters after the .exe, and that's why you see the "...".
The documentation says the last parameter is the size in bytes of the string, including the null terminator. So we need to know the length of the string (lstrlen(szPath)
), we need to account for the null terminator (+ 1
), and we need to convert from TCHARs to bytes (sizeof(TCHAR)*
).
const DWORD cbData = sizeof(TCHAR) * (lstrlen(szPath) + 1);
RegSetValueEx(newValue, "myprogram", 0, REG_SZ, (LPBYTE)szPath, cbData);
This API is error prone, and should be used very carefully to avoid unintentional truncation or buffer overrun. (The fact that you need those casts to get it to compile should make you very cautious.) Many Windows functions that take pointers to strings want lengths in characters (which may not be bytes) or they figure out the length from the termination. This one doesn't do either of those things.