Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!brl-adm!adm!Alan_T._Cote.OsbuSouth@Xerox.COM
From: Alan_T._Cote.OsbuSouth@Xerox.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Null-terminated C strings
Message-ID: <11467@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: 25 Jan 88 19:06:41 GMT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 19

In article <2294@haddock.ISC.COM> karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>|"The \c escape at the end of a string literal suppresses the trailing NUL.
>|If it appears other than at the end, it is ignored, but may serve to separate
>|an octal or hex escape from a following digit."  [Proposed wording]
>
>So, what do y'all think?  Is this a good idea?  Should the two features both
>exist but have different notations?  (That was my original plan, with "\c" to
>suppress the NUL and "\z" to represent a zero-width separator.)

The idea of an escape to suppress the trailing NUL is, I think, a good one.

However, I would recommend a different escape to represent a zero-width
separator, as follows:  Use the string concatenation facility!  The sequence, ""
should suffice to do the job.  For example, ...

EX#1:		char *a="\0101\z3";		/* using Karl's idea */
EX#2:		char *a="\0101""3";	/* my suggestion */

Wouldn't EX#2 accomplish what you wanted EX#1 to accomplish?