What does {0} mean when initializing an object?

Question

When {0} is used to initialize an object, what does it mean? I can\'t find any references to {0} anywhere, and because of the curly braces Google s

Answer 1

It's syntatic sugar to initialize your entire structure to empty/zero/null values.

Long version

SHELLEXECUTEINFO sexi;
sexi.cbSize = 0;
sexi.fMask = 0;
sexi.hwnd = NULL;
sexi.lpVerb = NULL;
sexi.lpFile = NULL;
sexi.lpParameters = NULL;
sexi.lpDirectory = NULL;
sexi.nShow = nShow;
sexi.hInstApp = 0;
sexi.lpIDList = NULL;
sexi.lpClass = NULL;
sexi.hkeyClass = 0;
sexi.dwHotKey = 0;
sexi.hMonitor = 0;
sexi.hProcess = 0;

Short version

SHELLEXECUTEINFO sexi = {0};

Wasn't that much easier?

It's also nice because:

• you don't have to hunt down every member and initialize it
• you don't have to worry that you might not initialize new members when they're added later
• you don't have have to call ZeroMemory