I mean, I wasn't trying to suggest you intentionally inject nulls in your strings for no reason! But that doesn't mean your data types should unexpectedly break if this ends up happening...

Generally my policy with std::string and NULs is "don't, ever" because someone is going to call c_str() on it and pass it to a C API, and bad things are going to happen. If you need to embed \0, then use std::vector<char>. Of course, you do get the slight benefit that in the cases where you don't call C APIs you won't have bad things happen, but I wouldn't could on that.

Again, this isn't about whether you go out of your way to insert it, but about whether the data type should be able to handle it regardless.

I'll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/5dhSN9aEljg