I don't mean to imply that they're difficult to overcome. I'm just trying to explain why people often say that C has poor string handling. Many modern languages provide more comprehensive string libraries, and the ones that are provided tend not to suffer from such problems. It's not that C is incapable of doing string handling (it's capable, yes), but when you constantly find yourself tossing out C's string library altogether and rolling your own instead, it becomes obvious that C's provided string handling functionality is inadequate for many use cases.