There's two common ways of storing a string.

1) NUL-terminated.

The end of the string is marked by the first occurance of a NUL character.

Pro: The string can be of any length.
Con: The string cannot contain NULs.

2) PASCAL string.

Named after the programming language. The length of the string is stored along with the string itself.

Pro: The string can contain any character.
Con: The size of the length field limits the size of the string.

Thelonius chose the latter. And in this case, the limit on the string length is (2^32)-1 (over 2 billion) since he's using a 32 bit signed int for the length field.

In reply to Re^3: AES Interoperability between Perl and C# by ikegami
in thread AES Interoperability between Perl and C# by jpfarmer

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