On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 11:38 AM, Sebastian Berg <sebastian@sipsolutions.net> wrote:

I remember talking with a colleague about something like that. And
basically an annoying thing there was that if you strip the zero bytes
in a zero padded string, some encodings (UTF16) may need one of the
zero bytes to work right.

I think it's really clear that you don't want to mess with the bytes in any way without knowing the encoding -- for UTF-16, the code unit is two bytes, so a "null" is two zero bytes in a row.

So generic "null padded" or "null terminated" is dangerous -- it would have to be "Null-padded utf-8" or whatever.

Though I

think it might have been something like "make everything in
hdf5/something similar work"

That would be nice :-), but I suspect HDF-5 is the same as everything else -- there are files in the wild where someone jammed the wrong thing into a text array ....

-CHB

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

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