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In all modern character sets, the null character has a code point value of zero. 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 ...
In computer programming, a null-terminated string is a character string stored as an array containing the characters and terminated with a null character (a character with an internal value of zero, called "NUL" in this article, not same as the glyph zero).
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.
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.
find_character(string,char) returns integer Description Returns the position of the start of the first occurrence of the character char in string. If the character is not found most of these routines return an invalid index value – -1 where indexes are 0-based, 0 where they are 1-based – or some value to be interpreted as Boolean FALSE.
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. In modern standard C++, a string literal such as "hello" still denotes a NUL-terminated array of characters.
Both character termination and length codes limit strings: For example, C character arrays that contain null (NUL) characters cannot be handled directly by C string library functions: Strings using a length code are limited to the maximum value of the length code. Both of these limitations can be overcome by clever programming.
A null pointer has a value reserved for indicating that the pointer does not refer to a valid object. Null pointers are routinely used to represent conditions such as the end of a list of unknown length or the failure to perform some action; this use of null pointers can be compared to nullable types and to the Nothing value in an option type.