Many symbolic debuggers limit the length of symbols they can display. For example, the Visual C++ debugger can display strings that contain up to 255 characters. Suppose you have a string that stores a SQL script. Such a script is likely to contain more than 255 characters. However, you cannot examine it because of the aforementioned debugger limitation. To overcome this problem, add explicit printf() or cout calls that display the string on the screen or write it to a log file.