Turning off printing of char pointer contents

["Ray Bejjani" <ray.bejjani@gmail.com>]

Hi,
I'm trying to turn off printing the contents of char pointers. I'm use
GDB to debug an embedded app remotely. In some instances the pointers
are left uninitialised and can point to sections of memory that cause
system crashes when accessed (or they cause external hardware to
change state when read). I am using DDD on top of GDB but I can
reproduce the issue with GDB as well. GDB seems to treat C strings in
a special manner, attempting to print the contents until it sees an
null terminator or hit the limit set by the "print elements" setting.
My system crashes when this happens.
Unfortunately, doing a set print elements 0 is interpreted as no
limit. Are there any other settings I can use to suppress this
feature? In particular, I would like it to treat char (or unsigned
char) pointers like it does other pointers where it doesn't attempt to
dereference them. I would still like to be able to display/print the
contents of strings when needed but only on demand. Failing that,
where in the code should I look to try and force this to not happen?

Thank you,
Ray Bejjani