hansen@pegasus.UUCP (02/03/84)
Is "Hello\0, world." a string, or is it two strings?
Put another way, is '\0' a legal character to embed
within a string?
I'd say that all depends on how you define a 'string'. K&R (page 181)
defines:
A string is a sequence of characters surrounded by double quotes, as
in "...". A string has type "array of characters" ... and is
initialized with the given characters. ... The compiler places a null
byte \0 at the end of each string so that programs which scan the
string can find its end.
By this definition "Hello\0, world." is a perfectly valid single string and
has a length of 15 characters.
However, if I look in my UNIX manual (System V) under string(3), I see:
The arguments s1, s2 and s point to strings (arrays of characters
terminated by a null character).
By this definition, "Hello\0, world." is also a perfectly valid string, but
this time has a length of only 6 because the null character has terminated
it there.
It all depends on your context as to what you want to consider it as. In
this example,
char string[] = "Hello\0, world.";
write(1,string,strlen(string));
write(1,string,sizeof(string));
the two writes won't produce the same answer. In most PRACTICAL cases, it
will.
In either case, it is still a single string.
Tony Hansen
pegasus!hansen
AT&T-IS