Null-terminated String

A null-terminated string is a sequence of ASCII characters, one to a byte, followed by a zero byte (a null byte). Null-terminated strings are common in C and C++. Here is how a string is declared in assembly language:

        .data
str:    .asciiz "Time is the ghost of space."

The characters are placed in memory in order, starting with the 'T'. The picture shows this. The blank bytes are filled with ASCII space (0x20). The last byte is filled with 0x00, represented with a slash.

Here is what it looks like in the data display of SPIM running on a Windows PC. The characters are placed in memory in sequential order beginning with 'T' (at address 0x10000000). This is hard to see in the display.

The right section of the SPIM display shows the characters in a string in the order they are stored in memory, one character per byte. However, in the hex display of memory, each group of four bytes is displayed in backwards order. The byte with the lowest address of a group is on the right; the byte with the highest address of the group is the leftmost byte. The red letters over each byte in the hex memory display have been added (by me) to show what each byte actually contains.

The hex memory display is aimed at displaying 32-bit little-endian integers. For 4-byte integers, this puts the most significant byte on the left, where it ordinarily goes when integers are printed. Unfortunately, this makes the hex display hard to read for data other than integers.