Question

I like “reinventing the wheel” for learning purposes, so I’m working on a container class for strings. Will using the NULL character as an array terminator (i.e., the last value in the array will be NULL) cause interference with the null-terminated strings?

I think it would only be an issue if an empty string is added, but I might be missing something.

EDIT: This is in C++.

Answer 1

"" is the empty string in C and C++, not NULL. Note that "" has exactly one element (instead of zero), meaning it is equivalent to {'\0'} as an array of char.

char const *notastring = NULL;
char const *emptystring = "";

emptystring[0] == '\0';  // true
notastring[0] == '\0';   // crashes