Thread: Setting a char * to null

Originally Posted by Snafuist

Thus, "" is a string of unknown size, probably far from being empty.

Technically in C, "" is null terminated and has a length of zero.

I read somewhere the other day that Chomsky's "mathematical model for grammars" (1956) was practically applied more in computing than it ever was in linguistics. But I don't want to start anything nasty...

laserlight, I love you. I could talk about stuff like that all day long.

Originally Posted by laserlight

It is not a string of size 4. Rather, it is a string of length 0 (or not a string at all, if you consider string literals with embedded null characters as merely char arrays).

No, I'm happy to regard the first part of it as a string of length 0. The whole thing altogether is still either a string of length 0 or a character array of size 4 or 5 (see below) or two strings concatenated together with their null-bytes or (just to make it more complicated) a string of size 0 concatenated with a character array of size 3.

It is not a char array of size 4. It is a char array of size 5, since the terminating null character must be counted.

Oh, this is probably my fault. I was thinking that you wrote "\0abc" as shorthand for

Code:

 {'\0', 'a', 'b', 'c'}

as in "\0abc" is part of "foo\0abcdefg". If the "" signs denote C strings, you are of course right. Then, according to my understanding, the size is 4, and according to your intention, the size is 5. I'm completely with you so far.


BTW, I'm in the process of writing you (among others) a private message. Shall I use PM or email?

Greets,
Philip