little question about string~

Howdy all~

this simple trick make me at a loss right now~
I searched my book which said a 5 elements string like "black" would contains 6 stuffs, and the last one should be '/0', and I was confused with the explainations in page. what's that plz ?

thanx in advance~

A "string" is basically an array of chars. Think of a string like [b][l][a][c][k][\0]. The '\0' is a NULL termination for the string. It's an empty "holding space".

String constants consist of n+1 characters, n being the number of printed characters in the string and a trailing nul character which determines the end of the string. The string

"black"

is shorthand for

'b','l','a','c','k','\0'

Five printable characters, plus the nul terminator which says "this is the end of the string". While C++ has a string class which doesn't make use of the nul terminator, C style strings are simply arrays of char. The array may be larger than the string it contains and the rest may contain garbage, so by having a specific character that ends the string, the functions for handling them are drastically simplified.

-Prelude

so, the size of "black" should be 6, yes ?

my book tell something about garbage in the chapter follows. maybe I could grasp the exact meaning after reading that. :)

thanx, guys~