C# strings and char arrays

[BioPhysEngr]

So, first of all don't use this pattern (null-terminated char arrays) unless there is a compelling need to (like communicating with a server that expects it or something).

However, there are two ways to do this:

The first (and easiest, I think) is to call .Trim(char) on the string like this:

char[] temp = new char[30]; // initialized as nulls '\0'
for(int z=0; z<10; z++)
    temp[z] = '0'; // temp should be "0000000000"

string strout = new string(temp); // create string from array of 0's
strout = strout.TrimEnd('\0'); //Remove any trailing null characters from the string

strout += "12345"; // should now be "000000000012345"

Note though that in C#, strings are immutable. So calling strout = strout.TrimEnd('\0'); is actually giving you an entirely different string

Alternatively, you could calculate the index of the null-terminator first and pass it as a parameter to the string constructor like this:

char[] temp = new char[30]; // initialized as nulls '\0'

for(int z=0; z<10; z++)
	temp[z] = '0'; // temp should be "0000000000"


int nullIndex = Array.IndexOf<char>(temp, '\0');  //Find the null terminator
//In case there there is no null terminator, consider the whole array to be useable data
if( nullIndex < 0 ) 
	nullIndex = temp.Length;

string strout = new string(temp, 0, nullIndex); //Three parameters: the array, the start index, the length

strout += "12345"; // should now be "000000000012345"

Console.WriteLine(strout);

Here is the relevant MSDN link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms131424.aspx

Make sense?

Good luck with C#. Your C++ background should make it easy to learn the language. Hopefully you'll find that things are a little more convenient in C# simply because you can avoid a lot of low-level management with fairly expressive syntax.