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;
};
Tagged . All content copyright James Fisher 2016. This post is not associated with my employer.
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