Do you see three

I am using an Active-X control within Visual Basic. The control takes a string input and outputs a barcode image. The barcode is capable of encoding binary data. The literature that comes with the control says "The data to be encoded must be represented in the form of a string and it is impossible to represent binary data in a string."  Clearly they are using the 'C' language or a derivative, how else could they state such utter nonsense? Why else would they come up with such a contrived and convoluted arrangement of escape characters to send the dreaded-in-'C' null character? Why make the world more complicated than it already is?  Why refute occam's razor?

Thankfully Visual Basic is relatively sane when it comes to data storage. It offers a choice of fixed length strings (in which n bytes of arbitrary binary data include null aka 'chr(0)' occupy exactly n bytes of memory - how can you do better than that?) or variable length strings, and a wealth of string functions which accept either variant.