Question

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What happens to memory after ‘\0’ in a C string?

Is it possible to make a pointer’s, say, third element NUL (‘\0’), thereafter “erasing” the pointers remaining elements?

Answer 1

Assuming you’re talking about C-style strings then yes, kind of:

char s[] = "abcdefgh";   // s = "abcdefgh"
                         // (actually contains 9 characters: "abcdefgh\0")

s[3] = '\0';             // s = "abc"
                         // (still contains 9 characters, but now: "abc\0efgh\0")

Note that the characters beyond s[3] haven’t magically disappeared at this point – it’s just that displaying the string, or passing it to any function that takes a C-style string, results in the string only appearing to contain three characters. You can still do e.g.

s[3] = 'x';              // s = "abcxefgh"
                         // (still contains 9 characters, but now: "abcxefgh\0")