How to count the number of bytes in a stream that contains nulls in C?

Question

I want to count the number of bytes in a stream that contains nulls. I know I can't use strlen() for this, is there an alternative?

char *stream = "\x11\x12\x13\x00\x12\x13\x14\x15";

Answer 1

1:
To include null in your count then probably you need to make your own function which works like strlen()
which count your null character also.
But you have provide some break point inside your function to terminate it.

or
2:
You can copy your stream to a file (write to a file).
Then process this file till the end of file.
Keep a count for every character read you can use <fgetc()>

Answer 2

This is basically a binary string & NOT a character string. So I don't think you can use any of the string related functions with this kind of data & achieve a valid result.

This is why we actually use a NULL character in our character array to differentiate between valid/invalid characters (end of string).

If this was an array & NOT a pointer, you could probably use sizeof(array) & you would get the total size of array & NOT the number of bytes of actual data.

You can use some sort of packing mechanism(encoding) & avoid the use of NULL character in the actual data.