null-terminated

string array with garbage character at end

I have a char array buffer that I am using to store characters that the user will input one by one. My code below works but has a few glitches that I can't figure out: when I execute a printf to see what's in Buffer, it does fill up but I get garbage characters at the end it won't stop at 8 characters despite being declared as char Bu...

Why null-terminated strings? Or: null-terminated vs. characters + length storage.

I'm writing a language interpreter in C, and my string type contains a length attribute, like so: struct String { char* characters; size_t length; }; Because of this, I have to spend a lot of time in my interpreter handling this kind of string manually since C doesn't include built-in support for it. I've considered switching...

[My]SQL VARCHAR Size and Null-Termination

Disclaimer: I'm very new to SQL and databases in general. I need to create a field that will store a maximum of 32 characters of text data. Does "VARCHAR(32)" mean that I have exactly 32 characters for my data? Do I need to reserve an extra character for null-termination? I conducted a simple test and it seems that this is a WYSIWYG ...

A C style string file format conundrum

I'm very confused with this wee little problem I have. I have a non-indexed file format header. (more specifically the ID3 header) Now, this header stores a string or rather three bytes for conformation that the data is actually an ID3 tag (TAG is the string btw.) Point is, now that this TAG in the file format is not null-terminated. So ...

Java BufferedReader for zero-terminated strings

I need to read zero-terminated strings from InputStream in Java. Is there similar to BufferedReader.readLine() method for reading zero-termianted strings? ...

Disabling NUL-termination of strings in GCC

Is it possible to globally disable NUL-terminated strings in GCC? I am using my own string library, and I have absolutely no need for the final NUL characters as it already stores the proper length internally in a struct. However, if I wanted to append 10 strings, this would mean that 10 bytes are unnecessarily allocated on the stack. ...

Why do strings in C need to be null terminated?

Just wondering why this is the case. I'm eager to know more about low level languages, and I'm only into the basics of C and this is already confusing me. Do languages like PHP automatically null terminate strings as they are being interpreted and / or parsed? I've also read a string in C is really an array of chars in an article I fou...

C# null terminated string

I am communicating with a server who needs null terminated string How can I do this smartly in C#? ...

Can a std::string contain embedded nulls?

For regular C strings, a NULL signifies the end of data. What about std::string, can I have a string with embedded NULLS? ...

Copying a file line by line into a char array with strncpy

So i am trying to read a text file line by line and save each line into a char array. From my printout in the loop I can tell it is counting the lines and the number of characters per line properly but I am having problems with strncpy. When I try to print the data array it only displays 2 strange characters. I have never worked with ...