[Python-Dev] String views (was: Re: Proof of the pudding:str.partition()) (original) (raw)

skip@pobox.com skip at pobox.com
Fri Sep 2 04:57:29 CEST 2005 

Fredrik> Python strings are character buffers with a known length, not
Fredrik> null-terminated C strings.  the CPython implementation
Fredrik> guarantees that the character buffer has a trailing NULL
Fredrik> character, but that's mostly to make it easy to pass Python
Fredrik> strings directly to traditional C API:s.

I'm obviously missing something that's been there all along. Since Python strings can contain NULs, why do we bother to NUL-terminate them? Clearly, any tradition C API that expects to operate on NUL-terminated strings would break with a string containing an embedded NUL.

Skip

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