.\" Generated by the Allegro makedoc utility .TH empty_string 3alleg4 "version 4.4.3" "Allegro" "Allegro manual" .SH NAME empty_string \- Universal string NULL terminator. Allegro game programming library.\& .SH SYNOPSIS .B #include .sp .B extern char empty_string[]; .SH DESCRIPTION You can't just rely on "" to be a valid empty string in any encoding format. This global buffer contains a number of consecutive zeros, so it will be a valid empty string no matter whether the program is running in ASCII, Unicode, or UTF-8 mode.