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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 ...
The BSD documentation has been fixed to make this clear, but POSIX, Linux, and Windows documentation still uses "character" in many places where "byte" or "wchar_t" is the correct term. Functions for handling memory buffers can process sequences of bytes that include null-byte as part of the data.
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 computer programming, a netstring is a formatting method for byte strings that uses a declarative notation to indicate the size of the string. [1] [2]Netstrings store the byte length of the data that follows, making it easier to unambiguously pass text and byte data between programs that could be sensitive to values that could be interpreted as delimiters or terminators (such as a null ...
Some operating systems or utilities go further by "sparsifying" files when writing or copying them: if a block contains only null bytes, it is not written to storage but rather marked as empty. When reading sparse files, the file system transparently converts metadata representing empty blocks into "real" blocks filled with null bytes at runtime.
Using a special byte other than null for terminating strings has historically appeared in both hardware and software, though sometimes with a value that was also a printing character. $ was used by many assembler systems, : used by CDC systems (this character had a value of zero), and the ZX80 used " [ 12 ] since this was the string delimiter ...
This method also allows shellcode to be placed after the overwritten return address on the Windows platform. Since executables are mostly based at address 0x00400000 and x86 is a little endian architecture, the last byte of the return address must be a null, which terminates the buffer copy and nothing is written beyond that. This limits the ...
If more even bytes (starting at 0) are null, then it is big-endian. The standard also allows the byte order to be stated explicitly by specifying UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE as the encoding type. When the byte order is specified explicitly this way, a BOM is specifically not supposed to be prepended to the text, and a U+FEFF at the beginning should be ...