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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).
The ability to represent a null character does not always mean the resulting string will be correctly interpreted, as many programs will consider the null to be the end of the string. Thus the ability to type it (in case of unchecked user input) creates a vulnerability known as null byte injection and can lead to security exploits. [10]
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 length of a string is the number of code units before the zero code unit. [1] The memory occupied by a string is always one more code unit than the length, as space is needed to store the zero terminator. Generally, the term string means a string where the code unit is of type char, which is exactly 8 bits on all modern machines.
In terminated strings, the terminating code is not an allowable character in any string. Strings with length field do not have this limitation and can also store arbitrary binary data. An example of a null-terminated string stored in a 10-byte buffer, along with its ASCII (or more modern UTF-8) representation as 8-bit hexadecimal numbers is:
Strings are recognized by looking for sequences of at least 4 (by default) printable characters terminating in a NUL character (that is, null-terminated strings).Some implementations provide options for determining what is recognized as a printable character, which is useful for finding non-ASCII and wide character text.
Nullable types are a feature of some programming languages which allow a value to be set to the special value NULL instead of the usual possible values of the data type.In statically typed languages, a nullable type is an option type, [citation needed] while in dynamically typed languages (where values have types, but variables do not), equivalent behavior is provided by having a single null ...
Strings are reference types in Visual Basic .NET, and so capable of being null (as opposed to simply zero-length, empty, strings). For such strings, this function returns True. (For empty strings it returns False.) [21] [18] IsNull(expression) This function determines whether the expression passed as its argument evaluates to Null. A null value ...