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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.
This allows the string to be any length with only the overhead of one byte; the alternative of storing a count requires either a string length limit of 255 or an overhead of more than one byte (there are other advantages/disadvantages described in the null-terminated string article).
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:
For character strings, the standard library uses the convention that strings are null-terminated: a string of n characters is represented as an array of n + 1 elements, the last of which is a "NUL character" with numeric value 0.
Modified UTF-8 strings never contain any actual null bytes but can contain all Unicode code points including U+0000, [61] which allows such strings (with a null byte appended) to be processed by traditional null-terminated string functions.
The std::string type is the main string datatype in standard C++ since 1998, but it was not always part of C++. From C, C++ inherited the convention of using null-terminated strings that are handled by a pointer to their first element, and a library of functions that manipulate such strings.
C string may refer to: Null-terminated string, known as a C string or C-style string due to it's use by the C programming language; C string handling, C functions to work with null-terminated strings; C-string (clothing), a specific type of thong, or a brand of women shorts
Because they contain many zero bytes, character strings representing such files cannot be manipulated by common null-terminated string handling logic. [ a ] The prevalence of string handling using this logic means that, even in the context of UTF-16 systems such as Windows and Java , UTF-16 text files are not commonly used.