Editing Null-terminated string (section)

== Character encodings ==
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.<ref>{{cite web|title=UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646|date=November 2003 |url=http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629#section-3|access-date=19 September 2013 |last1=Yergeau |first1=François }}</ref><ref><!-- This is the encoding table provided as a resource by the Unicode consortium: http://www.unicode.org/resources/utf8.html -->{{cite web|title=Unicode/UTF-8-character table|url=http://www.utf8-chartable.de/|access-date=13 September 2013}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|last=Kuhn|first=Markus|title=UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ|url=http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#utf-8|access-date=13 September 2013}}</ref> However, it is common to store the subset of ASCII or UTF-8 – every character except NUL – in null-terminated strings. Some systems use "[[modified UTF-8]]" which encodes NUL as two non-zero bytes (0xC0, 0x80) and thus allow all possible strings to be stored. This is not allowed by the UTF-8 standard, because it is an [[UTF-8#Overlong encodings|overlong encoding]], and it is seen as a security risk. Some other byte may be used as end of string instead, like 0xFE or 0xFF, which are not used in UTF-8.

[[UTF-16]] uses 2-byte integers and as either byte may be zero (and in fact ''every other'' byte is, when representing ASCII text), cannot be stored in a null-terminated byte string. However, some languages implement a string of 16-bit [[UTF-16]] characters, terminated by a 16-bit NUL (0x0000).