Editing Null-terminated string (section)

{{Short description|Data structure}}
{{Redirect|CString||C string (disambiguation)}}
{{see also|String (computer science)#Null-terminated}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=August 2021}}

In [[computer programming]], a '''null-terminated string''' is a [[character string]] stored as an [[Array data structure|array]] containing the characters and terminated with a ''[[null character]]'' (a character with an internal value of zero, called "NUL" in this article, not same as the [[glyph]] zero). Alternative names are ''[[C string handling|C string]]'', which refers to the [[C (programming language)|C programming language]] and '''ASCIIZ'''<ref>{{Cite web |title=Chapter 15 - MIPS Assembly Language |url=https://people.scs.carleton.ca/~sivarama/org_book/org_book_web/solution_manual/org_soln_one/arch_book_solution_ch15.pdf |access-date=2023-10-09 |website=Carleton University}}</ref> (although C can use encodings other than [[ASCII]]).

The length of a string is found by searching for the (first) NUL. This can be slow as it takes O(''n'') ([[linear time]]) with respect to the string length. It also means that a string cannot contain a NUL (there is a NUL in memory, but it is after the last character, not {{em|in}} the string).