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I have written a short article explaining why null terminated strings as they exist in C cannot represent proper ASCII and UTF-8 because of the null terminator. It's not a full explanation of how strings work but it might be helpful for you.

https://kttnr.net/blog/null-terminated-strings-are-incorrect...

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SQLite does store a null character in strings, it has lots of documented [1] issues in the API level though.

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/nulinstr.html

Thanks for this link.

How do you get the null byte into the string? Is it through casting blob to string? The way I have encountered this is when using the C API in which string arguments for prepared statements are passed as char pointers. If those contain the null byte then the string is cut off.

Allowing null characters and then mishandling them is worse than not allowing them.

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