Array

[Hetal Patel]

#51007

Why don’t we append a terminating null at the end of any array and not just char[]?

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[Nitesh User Do not delete]

#51020

Null termination works for strings because there is a tightly defined encoding set, be it ASCII, Unicode or whatever. Simply put, a char is an integral type which has one state which is conveniently the empty character. When inspecting a null-terminated int array. We know we have hit the end of the array when we encounter an int object which stores a zero.

This works until you want to store a zero somewhere in your array.

You can’t disambiguate a “valid zero” from an “end of array zero,” at least you can’t with a simple integer type.

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Regards,
Nitesh Bavishiya

[Author]

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