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Concept
Null-terminated string
Summary
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). Alternative names are C string, which refers to the C programming language and ASCIIZ (although C can use encodings other than ASCII).
The length of a string is found by searching for the (first) NUL. This can be slow as it takes O(n) (linear time) with respect to the string length. It also means that a string cannot contain a NUL (there is a NUL in memory, but it is after the last character, not the string).
Null-terminated strings were produced by the .ASCIZ directive of the PDP-11 assembly languages and the ASCIZ directive of the MACRO-10 macro assembly language for the PDP-10. These predate the development of the C programming language, but other forms of strings were often used.
At the time C (and the languages that it was derived from) was developed, memory was extremely limited, so using only one byte of overhead to store the length of a string was attractive. The only popular alternative at that time, usually called a "Pascal string" (a more modern term is "length-prefixed"), used a leading byte to store the length of the string. This allows the string to contain NUL and made finding the length of an already stored string need only one memory access (O(1) (constant) time), but limited string length to 255 characters (on a machine using 8-bit bytes). C designer Dennis Ritchie chose to follow the convention of null-termination to avoid the limitation on the length of a string and because maintaining the count seemed, in his experience, less convenient than using a terminator.
This had some influence on CPU instruction set design. Some CPUs in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Zilog Z80 and the DEC VAX, had dedicated instructions for handling length-prefixed strings.
Official source
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