Ok, pulling my hair out here, I only picked up fasm about a week ago so the answer is probably obvious..

I wrote a .dll to handle strings at a high level, because I'm struggling to get my head round the whole string handling thing... in this .dll I have the following functions..

AllocString(string.s) <--- takes a string as a parameter and returns it to eax, which is a bit of a cheat I know

AddString(dest.s,src.s) <--- concats 2 strings and returns the result to eax

The AddString() function returns (or I should say, receives) garbled text when I call it thusly..

invoke AddString,[v_str1],[v_str2] <--- doesn't work
invoke AddString,"Hello ","World!" <--- works fine

defined as..
v_str1 rd 1
v_str2 rd 1

so, my question is.. can you (a) tell my how to get this horrible high-level cheat to work, or (b) explain how I should be doing it properly without cheating.

Thanks!

The symbol v_strX holds the address of (or is a pointer to-) the data you define. [v_strX] holds the dword or 4 bytes at that address. It seems your AddString works on two pointers so you would want to do:

If instead you wanted the values of v_strX to be pointers (like rd suggests) to strings:

Hope that helps

That makes things a bit clearer.. but the function in the .dll needs to take actual strings, not pointers. (string in-->string out to eax)

v_str1 and v_str2 need to be declared undefined, and changeable (with changeable size)

As a high-level coder with no asm experience this is all really confusing.

You can't "return a string in eax". The eax register is only 32 bits long, enough for only 3 characters plus a terminating null. You have to pass pointers, there is no other way. Your HL language may have been hiding this detail from you.

I had a feeling I was doing something drastically wrong.

Can someone show a quick example of dynamically working with strings (that aren't pre-defined, but can hold any string/length), concatenation, passing string values with invoke etc..

I'd appreciate any help/info you can give, baring in mind that i have virtually no experience with asm, but the high-level/external stuff is no problem.

For dynamic strings you would allocate/deallocate memory on the fly instead of using fixed string definitions.

Well maybe you should learn pointers first? Most "dynamic" parameters are passed via pointers.