Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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 not used for any character, to be used as a string terminator.
Variable-width encodings can be used in both byte strings and wide strings. String length and offsets are measured in bytes or wchar_t, not in "characters", which can be confusing to beginning programmers. UTF-8 and Shift JIS are often used in C byte strings, while UTF-16 is often used in C wide strings when wchar_t is 16 bits.
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 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 programmers draw a sharp distinction between a "string", aka a "string of characters", which by definition is always null terminated, vs. a "array of characters" which may be stored in the same array but is often not null terminated. Using C string handling functions on such an array of characters often seems to work, but later leads 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; C string (music), one of the strings on various instruments, for example the lowest string on ...
C string literals are null-terminated; that is to say, a trailing null character as an end-of-string sentinel: const char * p ; p = "the rain in Spain" ; /* null-terminated */ Null-termination must be manually maintained for string variables stored in arrays (this is often partly handled by library routines).