Re: NUL byte in string literal

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2018-04-02 11:24 GMT+02:00 Matthew Wild <mwild1@gmail.com>:

> Just a bit of feedback that I'm surprised hasn't come up before, but I
> couldn't find it in the archives.
>
> I feel the manual is a bit misleading when it says the following:
>
> >  Strings in Lua can contain any 8-bit value, including embedded zeros, which can be specified as '\0'.
>
> While this is correct in most cases, it's not technically accurate
> that you can actually always use \0. If it is followed by numeric
> digits, they will instead be interpreted instead as a numeric escape
> sequence.
>
> That leaves the only truly correct way of representing \0 (that
> doesn't depend on context) as \000.

Not so. \x00 also works, and is IMHO preferable.

Anyway, all this is equally true of \1, \2, etc, so the manual is
justified in making no song and dance about it when embedded zeros are
discussed.