README.md

Strings in C

A String in C programming is a sequence of characters terminated with a null character ‘\0’. The C String is stored as an array of characters. The difference between a character array and a C string is that the string in C is terminated with a unique character ‘\0’.

Creating a String in C

Let us create a string "Hello". It comprises five char values. In C, the literal representation of a char type uses single quote symbols − such as 'H'. These five alphabets put inside single quo[...]

Example char greeting[6] = {'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0'};

Printing a String (Using %s Format Specifier)

C provides a format specifier "%s" which is used to print a string when you're using functions like printf() or fprintf() functions.

Example The "%s" specifier tells the function to iterate through the array, until it encounters the null terminator (\0) and printing each character. This effectively prints the entire string represented [...]

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#include <stdio.h>

int main (){

char greeting[] = {'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0'}; printf("Greeting message: %s\n", greeting );

return 0;

}

Output It will produce the following output − Greeting message: Hello

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You can declare an oversized array and assign less number of characters, to which the C compiler has no issues. However, if the size is less than the characters in the initialization, you may get garbage values in the output.

char greeting[3] = {'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0'};

printf("%s", greeting);

Constructing a String using Double Quotes

Instead of constructing a char array of individual char values in single quotation marks, and using "\0" as the last element, C lets you construct a string by enclosing the characters within doubl[...]

Example Open Compiler #include <stdio.h>

int main() { // Creating string char greeting[] = "Hello World";

// Printing string printf("%s\n", greeting);

return 0; }

Output It will produce the following output − Hello World

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String Input Using scanf()

Declaring a null-terminated string causes difficulty if you want to ask the user to input a string. You can accept one character at a time to store in each subscript of an array, with the help of a for loop =

Syntax

for(i = 0; i < 6; i++){

scanf("%c", &greeting[i]); } greeting[i] = '\0';

Example

In the following example, you can input a string using scanf() function, after inputting the specific characters (5 in the following example), we are assigning null ('\0') to terminate the string.

printf("Starting typing... ");

for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) { scanf("%c", &greeting[i]); }

// Assign NULL manually greeting[i] = '\0';

// Printing the string printf("Value of greeting: %s\n", greeting);

Output Run the code and check its output −

Starting typing... Hello

Value of greeting: Hello

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Example

It is not possible to input "\0" (the null string) because it is a non-printable character. To overcome this, the "%s" format specifier is used in the scanf() statement −

#include <stdio.h> #include <string.h>

int main (){

char greeting[10];

printf("Enter a string:\n"); scanf("%s", greeting);

printf("You entered: \n"); printf("%s", greeting);

return 0; }

Output

Run the code and check its output −

Enter a string:

Hello

You entered:

Hello