Strings

Strings are actually one-dimensional array of characters terminated by a null character '\0'. Thus a null-terminated string contains the characters that comprise the string followed by a null.

Declaring a String

char str_name[size];

Methods of Initializing String

1. char str[] = "Hello World";

2. char str[50] = "Hello World";

3. char str[] = {'H','e','l','l','o',' ','W','o','r','l','d','\0'};

4. char str[12] = {'H','e','l','l','o',' ','W','o','r','l','d','\0'};

To hold the null character at the end of the array, the size of the character array containing the string is one more than the number of characters in the word.

Input / Output a String

The C programming language doesn't provide an inbuilt datatype for Strings, but it has an access specifier %s.

Input a String

#include <stdio.h>

int main () {

   char greeting[100];
   scanf("%s", greeting);
   return 0;
}

Note that scanf can't be used to input string with spaces or newlines.

Output a String

#include <stdio.h>

int main () {

   char greeting[] = "Hello World";
   printf("%s\n", greeting);
   return 0;
}

String Functions