Question

I have a struct like this:

typedef struct string {
 unsigned long length;
 unsigned *data;
} string;

Can I write something so that when I do this:

string s;

the length property is zero, instead of whatever happens to be in the memory? data works well, as it’s preset to zero or a null pointer.

Example of what happens right now:

string s;
printf("length:  %lu\n", s.length);
printf("pointer: %lu\n", (unsigned long) s.data);

Result:

length:  140737488347584
pointer: 0

I want to avoid having to call an initialisation function on each new string just to set length to zero.

More information

Now that I think about it, it may not be really necessary to do this in my particular case (though it would be nice) because most people would initially set the string through ctou (which imports UTF-8 from char pointer) and that function sets length to zero anyway.

Answer 1

You could use

string s = {0,NULL};