What does \x00 mean in binary file?

file binary ascii binaryfiles
Bagong21 picture Bagong21 · May 10, 2011 · Viewed 62.7k times · Source

Once I asked a guy "what is the difference between ASCII and Binary files?"

And he said "Binary files always have \x00"

I've been searching about this and found What is the meaning of \x00 , \x04 in PHP

so the conclusion is, ASCII files don't have NULL character?

Answer

jwismar picture jwismar · May 10, 2011

An ASCII file might be read or interpreted as having NULL-terminated strings, carriage returns & line-feeds, or other control characters, that are intended to be read and acted on. For example, a text reader might look for a line of text, where a line is "however many characters you see before you get to a linefeed"

A binary file is considered to be just a sequence of bytes - none of them has any special meaning, in the sens that a text-reader would interpret them.

\x00 is an example of a specific byte value (HEX 0), that might be interpreted in a special way by a text reader.

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