Learn more about Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

What is a ‘binary-safe’ string?

What do people mean when they say “binary-safe strings”? In C, strings are traditionally represented as a pointer to bytes, i.e. char*, where the array of bytes is terminated by a “null byte” (i.e. '\0', i.e. 0). This representation has the disadvantage that your string of bytes cannot itself contain a null byte, and so this structure cannot represent arbitrary strings of bytes. That is, C-strings are not “binary-safe”.

Binary-safe strings in C are typically implemented with an explicit known length. Something like:

struct bytestring {
  size_t len;
  unsigned char * bytes;
};

What can computers do? What are the limits of mathematics? And just how busy can a busy beaver be? This year, I’m writing Busy Beavers, a unique interactive book on computability theory. You and I will take a practical and modern approach to answering these questions — or at least learning why some questions are unanswerable!

It’s only $19, and you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

More by Jim

Tagged . All content copyright James Fisher 2016. This post is not associated with my employer. Found an error? Edit this page.