Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Hexadecimal notation for null is 00. Decoding the Base64 string AA== also yields the null character. In documentation, the null character is sometimes represented as a single-em-width symbol containing the letters "NUL". In Unicode, there is a character for this: U+2400 ␀ SYMBOL FOR NULL.
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.
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 NULL character (code 0) is represented by Ctrl-@, "@" being the code immediately before "A" in the ASCII character set. For convenience, some terminals accept Ctrl-Space as an alias for Ctrl-@. In either case, this produces one of the 32 ASCII control codes between 0 and 31.
In C and C++, 0 represents the null pointer. As with Boolean values, the C standard library includes a macro definition NULL whose use is encouraged. Other languages provide a specific null or nil value and when this is the case no alternative should be used. The typed pointer constant nullptr has been introduced with C++11.
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.
In the C# programming language, pointers are supported by either marking blocks of code that include pointers with the unsafe keyword, or by using the System.Runtime.CompilerServices assembly provisions for pointer access. The syntax is essentially the same as in C++, and the address pointed can be either managed or unmanaged memory.
Most C compilers generate no code for null statements, which has historical and performance reasons. ; An empty block (compound statement) is also a NOP, and may be more legible, but will still have no code generated for it by the compiler. {} In some cases, such as the body of a function, a block must be used, but this can be empty.