Bug fixed in 12.3 or earlier
This question is about parsing files that contain nulls (character code zero) as field separators.
Intending to attempt to answer this I began by trying to enter a string containing a null, e.g. by typing:
str = "123\.00456" in the way that they are displayed in the linked question. This is converted to "123456" as it is typed but evaluating it gives the following error [using Mathematica 10.3.1 on Mac OS X 10.11]:
Syntax::tsntxi: "str=123\.00456" is incomplete; more input is needed.
So the null is being interpreted as a string termination character. (But note that the message above is the result of copy & paste -- in the Front End it is displayed as "str = 123456".)
Using the Unicode form \:0000 gives the same error and I tried using \[Null] in my string but this has a character code different from zero (62368) so is not quite what I'm after.
I can generate the string using e.g.
(str = FromCharacterCode[{49, 50, 51, 0, 52, 53, 54}]) // FullForm "123\.00456"
But is there any way of typing a string containing nulls directly, i.e. in a quoted string?
Also should it be considered a bug that it is not possible to use the FullForm of a string containing a null as its InputForm?
