Erik followed up: > From what I'm hearing from you all is that a null > in UTF-8 is for termination and termination only. > Is this correct?
Not quite. A null byte (0x00) in UTF-8 is only a representation of the NULL character (U+0000). It can be present in UTF-8 for whatever purposes one might use a NULL in textual data. One very common usage of a NULL is as a convention for string termination. And if you are using NULL's that way, then of course any API which depends on that convention will have a problem with NULL characters embedded *in* the string for other reasons, since they will prematurely detect end-of-string in their processing. If your string termination convention does *not* use NULL (but instead some other mechanism such as explicit length attributes), then there is no inherent reason why you could not use NULL's for some other purpose embedded in the string -- for example to delimit fielded data within the string, or some other purpose. In such cases, if your Unicode data is represented in the UTF-8 encoding form, then those NULL's will end up as 0x00 embedded bytes, because that is how NULL's characters are represented in UTF-8. --Ken
