C was designed in the 1970s with the goal of giving you minimal overhead, bar using a macro-assembler. The way C handles "strings" provides exactly that. The O

C was designed in the 1970s with the goal of giving you minimal overhead, bar using a macro-assembler. The way C handles "strings" provides exactly that. The OP clearly stated that he did not mind the overhead (in terms of executable size, memory consumption, execution speed) in his particular use case.