Null Character

The null character, also known as the null terminator, is a character with the value of zero. Besides representing a NOP, nowadays it is known as the control character that indicates the end of an string in C-like data formats. In essence, the null terminator is a way to encode the end of a string using its own contents. The common alternative to null terminators is storing the length of the string explicitly; this is how languages other than C do it, which is safer and less error prone.