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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.
Null-terminated strings require that the encoding does not use a zero byte (0x00) anywhere; therefore it is not possible to store every possible ASCII or UTF-8 string. [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] However, it is common to store the subset of ASCII or UTF-8 – every character except NUL – in null-terminated strings.
A string is defined as a contiguous sequence of code units terminated by the first zero code unit (often called the NUL code unit). [1] This means a string cannot contain the zero code unit, as the first one seen marks the end of the string. The length of a string is the number of code units before the zero code unit. [1]
In terminated strings, the terminating code is not an allowable character in any string. Strings with length field do not have this limitation and can also store arbitrary binary data. An example of a null-terminated string stored in a 10-byte buffer, along with its ASCII (or more modern UTF-8) representation as 8-bit hexadecimal numbers is:
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
The control code ranges 0x00–0x1F ("C0") and 0x7F originate from the 1967 edition of US-ASCII.The standard ISO/IEC 2022 (ECMA-35) defines extension methods for ASCII, including a secondary "C1" range of 8-bit control codes from 0x80 to 0x9F, equivalent to 7-bit sequences of ESC with the bytes 0x40 through 0x5F.
This led to the idea that text in Chinese and other languages would take more space in UTF-8. However, text is only larger if there are more of these code points than 1-byte ASCII code points, and this rarely happens in the real-world documents due to spaces, newlines, digits, punctuation, English words, and (depending on document format) markup.
A numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and a character entity reference refers to a character by a predefined name. A numeric character reference uses the format &#nnnn; or &#xhhhh; where nnnn is the code point in decimal form, and hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form.