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For function that manipulate strings, modern object-oriented languages, like C# and Java have immutable strings and return a copy (in newly allocated dynamic memory), while others, like C manipulate the original string unless the programmer copies data to a new string.
A "character" may use any number of Unicode code points. [20] For instance an emoji flag character takes 8 bytes, since it is "constructed from a pair of Unicode scalar values" [21] (and those values are outside the BMP and require 4 bytes each). UTF-16 in no way assists in "counting characters" or in "measuring the width of a string".
For processing, a format should be easy to search, truncate, and generally process safely. [citation needed] All normal Unicode encodings use some form of fixed size code unit. Depending on the format and the code point to be encoded, one or more of these code units will represent a Unicode code point. To allow easy searching and truncation, a ...
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]
Current Windows versions and all back to Windows XP and prior Windows NT (3.x, 4.0) are shipped with system libraries that support string encoding of two types: 16-bit "Unicode" (UTF-16 since Windows 2000) and a (sometimes multibyte) encoding called the "code page" (or incorrectly referred to as ANSI code page). 16-bit functions have names suffixed with 'W' (from "wide") such as SetWindowTextW.
Unicode added more characters that could be considered controls, but it makes a distinction between these "Formatting characters" (such as the zero-width non-joiner) and the 65 control characters. The Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) character set contains 65 control codes, including all of the ASCII control codes plus ...
For example, the null character (U+0000 NULL) is used in C-programming application environments to indicate the end of a string of characters. In this way, these programs only require a single starting memory address for a string (as opposed to a starting address and a length), since the string ends once the program reads the null character.
The term byte string usually indicates a general-purpose string of bytes, rather than strings of only (readable) characters, strings of bits, or such. Byte strings often imply that bytes can take any value and any data can be stored as-is, meaning that there should be no value interpreted as a termination value.