Method and apparatus for processing null terminated character strings

A method and apparatus for detecting the null byte at the end of a character string. The method and apparatus first logically concatenates two 32-bit input values into a single 64 bit value. Next, the 64-bit value is divided into 8 bytes. Then, a logical OR operation is performed on each byte and the results are put into an encoder. Finally, the encoder interprets the results of the OR operations and places output values into processor registers which indicate whether or where a null byte was detected.