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Asked: 2026-05-11T15:18:19+00:00

Note: /* * Trivial code */ wchar_t *greeting = LHello World!; char *greeting_ =

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Note:

/* * Trivial code */ wchar_t *greeting = L'Hello World!'; char *greeting_ = 'Hello World!';

WinDbg:

0:000> ?? greeting wchar_t * 0x00415810 'Hello World!' 0:000> ?? greeting_ char * 0x00415800 'Hello World!'  0:000> db 0x00415800 00415800  48 65 6c 6c 6f 20 57 6f-72 6c 64 21 00 00 00 00  Hello World!.... 00415810  48 00 65 00 6c 00 6c 00-6f 00 20 00 57 00 6f 00  H.e.l.l.o. .W.o. 00415820  72 00 6c 00 64 00 21 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  r.l.d.!.........

Question:

  • What is the purpose of the NULL character: 00 between ASCII characters in wchar_t – Win32?
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1 Answer

  1. wchar_t is a wide-character string, so each character takes 2 bytes of storage. ‘H’ as a wchar_t is 0x0048. Since x86 is little-endian, you see the bytes in memory in order 48 00.

    db in windbg will dump the bytes and provide how its viewed as an ASCII string, hence the H.E.L. … output you see. You can use ‘du’ to dump the memory as a unicode string.

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