Recently, when reading string data from a binary file, I stumbled across the “problem” of trimming the terminating character from a null-terminated string. I started getting all creative about it, but it soon became quite a mess (code-wise), so I that down and had a re-think. This is how I ultimately ended up doing it.

Before I describe my solution, let’s create some code to visualize the problem:

[byte[]]$bytes = 0x50,0x00,0x72,0x00,0x6F,0x00,0x67,0x00,0x72,0x00,0x61,0x00,0x6D,0x00,0x6D,0x00,0x65,0x00,0x00,0x00
$unicodeString = [System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetString($bytes)
"'$($unicodeString)'"

Running this code will give you the following result:

Notice that I have wrapped the output value of the variable unicodeString in quotation marks to see the full length of the string. You can clearly “see” the last null character being there.

Being a string object, we should be able to use the Trim-method:

"'$($unicodeString.Trim())'"

Result:

This clearly didn’t work though, and to understand why, we need to think about what a null-terminating string actually is. Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult, as the answer is in the name; it’s a string with a terminating null character. But then why don’t Trim work? The reason is that this particular null character is not the same as an empty string, or even $null. It’s the ASCII character NUL. It so happens that this is the first character in the ASCII-table, so we can easily modify our previous code to get the desired result:

"'$($unicodeString.Trim([char]0))'"

Result:

That’s more like it.

Hope this short post have been helpful.