C TutorialLesson 19Free preview

C Strings

This lesson is part of C · All levels

Summary

Strings in C are actually a set of characters stored in a char array, terminated implicitly by the character null worth '\0'. Since C does not have a dedicated operator for the string, operations such as copying or merging are performed through library functions such as strcpy, strlen, and strcat from the string.h header. String length is obtained by strlen, whereas the size of the array can be known by sizeof. Understanding the terminator is important so that string manipulation is not wrong.

Key points

String C is a char array enclosed by the character '\0'
Common functions: strlen (length), strcpy (copy), strcat (joint), strcmp (binding)
Sizeof returns array sizes including null, strlen counts characters without null
Always make sure the array capacity is sufficient before copying the string so it doesn't overflow

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