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This allows the string to contain NUL and made finding the length need only one memory access (O(1) (constant) time), but limited string length to 255 characters. C designer Dennis Ritchie chose to follow the convention of null-termination to avoid the limitation on the length of a string and because maintaining the count seemed, in his ...
In most encodings, this is translated to a single code unit with a zero value. For instance, in UTF-8 it is a single zero byte. However, in Modified UTF-8 the null character is encoded as two bytes: 0xC0,0x80. This allows the byte with the value of zero, which is now not used for any character, to be used as a string terminator.
The empty string is a legitimate string, upon which most string operations should work. Some languages treat some or all of the following in similar ways: empty strings, null references, the integer 0, the floating point number 0, the Boolean value false , the ASCII character NUL , or other such values.
Length-prefixed "short" Strings (up to 64 bytes), marker-terminated "long" Strings and (optional) back-references Arbitrary-length heterogenous arrays with end-marker Arbitrary-length key/value pairs with end-marker Structured Data eXchange Formats (SDXF) Big-endian signed 24-bit or 32-bit integer Big-endian IEEE double
If n is greater than the length of the string then most implementations return the whole string (exceptions exist – see code examples). Note that for variable-length encodings such as UTF-8 , UTF-16 or Shift-JIS , it can be necessary to remove string positions at the end, in order to avoid invalid strings.
A UTF-8 file that contains only ASCII characters is identical to an ASCII file. Legacy programs can generally handle UTF-8 encoded files, even if they contain non-ASCII characters. For instance, the C printf function can print a UTF-8 string because it only looks for the ASCII '%' character to define a formatting string. All other bytes are ...
Some operating systems such as CP/M tracked file length only in units of disk blocks, and used control-Z to mark the end of the actual text in the file. [49] For these reasons, EOF, or end-of-file , was used colloquially and conventionally as a three-letter acronym for control-Z instead of SUBstitute.
A method to determine what encoding a system is using internally is to ask for the "length" of string containing a single non-BMP character. If the length is 2 then UTF-16 is being used. 4 indicates UTF-8. 3 or 6 may indicate CESU-8 . 1 may indicate UTF-32, but more likely indicates the language decodes the string to code points before ...