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It is often abbreviated as NUL (or NULL, though in some contexts that term is used for the null pointer). In 8-bit codes, it is known as a null byte. The original meaning of this character was like NOP—when sent to a printer or a terminal, it has no effect (some terminals, however, incorrectly display it as space).
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.
Zero-byte files may arise in cases where a program creates a file but aborts or is interrupted prematurely while writing to it. Because writes are cached in memory and only flushed to disk at a later time , a program that does not flush its writes to disk or terminate normally may result in a zero-byte file. When the zero-byte file is made ...
In computing, a null pointer or null reference is a value saved for indicating that the pointer or reference does not refer to a valid object. Programs routinely use null pointers to represent conditions such as the end of a list of unknown length or the failure to perform some action; this use of null pointers can be compared to nullable types ...
0x00 (null, NUL, \0, ^@), originally intended to be an ignored character, but now used by many programming languages including C to mark the end of a string. 0x07 (bell, BEL, \a, ^G), which may cause the device to emit a warning such as a bell or beep sound or the screen flashing. 0x08 (backspace, BS, \b, ^H), may overprint the previous character.
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.
Some three-digit octal escape sequences are too large to fit in a single byte. This results in an implementation-defined value for the resulting byte. The escape sequence \0 is a commonly used octal escape sequence, which denotes the null character, with value zero in ASCII and most encoding systems.
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1] [2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.