Difference between a 'binary string" and a "string

Posted by neilvp (neilvp), 19 April 2007

I thought this sounded like a stupid question until I built up the courage to asked the 'professional programmers' that work where I do - and all I got was sheepish looks and mutterings of "need coffee".

The question being...
What is the difference between a 'binary string' and a 'string'?

At the fundamental level a string is composed of hex digits, which are made up of 1s and 0s which, by definition, is binary.

The supplementary question is then, when is it appropriate (or not ) to use binary scan, as opposed to scan?

Many thanks.

Neil

Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 20 April 2007

I seem to recall that non-binary strings do strange things with ASCII characters 128 to 159 - but I have been looking for that and can't see it straight away. Could be another language. Binary scan, etc, are used to get things like 4 byte integers out of variables, whereas scan is used to get number represented by strings of characters

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