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A character constant cannot be empty (i.e. '' is invalid syntax), although a string may be (it still has the null terminating character). Multi-character constants (e.g. 'xy' ) are valid, although rarely useful — they let one store several characters in an integer (e.g. 4 ASCII characters can fit in a 32-bit integer, 8 in a 64-bit one).
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 ...
The length of a string is the number of code units before the zero code unit. [1] The memory occupied by a string is always one more code unit than the length, as space is needed to store the zero terminator. Generally, the term string means a string where the code unit is of type char, which is exactly 8 bits on all modern machines.
The ability to represent a null character does not always mean the resulting string will be correctly interpreted, as many programs will consider the null to be the end of the string. Thus the ability to type it (in case of unchecked user input ) creates a vulnerability known as null byte injection and can lead to security exploits.
The length of a string can also be stored explicitly, for example by prefixing the string with the length as a byte value. This convention is used in many Pascal dialects; as a consequence, some people call such a string a Pascal string or P-string. Storing the string length as byte limits the maximum string length to 255.
The text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character to produce a valid string of Unicode code points for display, so the user sees "f r". A poorly implemented text editor might write out the replacement character when the user saves the file; the data in the file will then become 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72 .
A string literal or anonymous string is a literal for a string value in the source code of a computer program. Modern programming languages commonly use a quoted sequence of characters, formally "bracketed delimiters", as in x = "foo", where , "foo" is a string literal with value foo. Methods such as escape sequences can be used to avoid the ...
A character literal is a type of literal in programming for the representation of a single character's value within the source code of a computer program. Languages that have a dedicated character data type generally include character literals; these include C , C++ , Java , [ 1 ] and Visual Basic . [ 2 ]