A character that is all 0 bits. Also written as "NUL," it is the first character in the ASCII and EBCDIC data codes. In hex, it displays and prints as 00; in decimal, it may appear as a single zero in a chart of codes, but displays and prints as a blank space.
Nulls are naturally found in binary numbers when a byte contains all zeros, and they are used to pad fields (see padding). A null may function as a delimiter; for example, in C, a null character is inserted at the end of a character string to mark the end of the text.
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