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Possible Duplicate:
What's the rationale for null terminated strings?
My question is very simple: why do C++ strings end in null terminators? Is this so that you do not need to keep count on the length?
Traditional strings in C and C++ use a null terminator to indicate the end of the string. Since string pointers simply pointed to an array of characters, without any length or other meta data, the null terminator was the only way to determine the length of the string.
As far as why it was done this way, that’s more difficult question to answer. There are many ways to store string data, that’s just one of them.