C Programming Strings

In this tutorial, you’ll find out about strings in C programming. You’ll learn to declare them, instate them, and use them for different I/O activities with the help of examples.

In C programming, a string is an arrangement of characters terminated with a null character \0. For instance:

char c[] = "c string";

When the compiler encounters a sequence of characters enclosed in the double quotation marks, it appends a null character \0 at the end by default.

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How to declare a string?

Here’s how you can declare strings:

char s[5];

Here, we have declared a string of 5 characters.

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How to initialize strings?

You can initialize strings in a number of ways.

char c[] = "abcd";

char c[50] = "abcd";

char c[] = {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', '\0'};

char c[5] = {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', '\0'};

Let’s take another example:

char c[5] = "abcde";

Here, we are attempting to allot 6 characters (the last character is ‘\0’) to a char array having 5 characters. This is awful and you ought to never do this.

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Assigning Values to Strings

Arrays and strings are second-class citizens in C; they do not support the assignment operator once it is declared. For example,

char c[100];
c = "C programming";  // Error! array type is not assignable.

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Read String from the user

You can use the scanf() function to read a string.

The scanf() function reads the sequence of characters until it encounters whitespace (space, newline, tab, etc.).

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Example 1: scanf() to read a string

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
    char name[20];
    printf("Enter name: ");
    scanf("%s", name);
    printf("Your name is %s.", name);
    return 0;
}

Output

Enter name: salman
Your name is salman.

Even though salman was entered in the above program, only “salman” was stored in the name string. It’s because there was a space after salman.

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How to read a line of text?

You can use the fgets() capacity to peruse a line of string. Also, you can use puts() to show the string.

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Example 2: fgets() and puts()

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
    char name[30];
    printf("Enter name: ");
    fgets(name, sizeof(name), stdin);  // read string
    printf("Name: ");
    puts(name);    // display string
    return 0;
}

Enter name: salman
Name: salman

Here, we have used fgets() function to read a string from the user.

fgets(name, sizeof(name), stdlin); // read string

The sizeof(name) results to 30. Hence, we can take a maximum of 30 characters as input which is the size of the name string.

To print the string, we have used puts(name);.

Note: The gets() function can also be to take input from the user. However, it is removed from the C standard.

It’s because gets() allows you to input any length of characters. Hence, there might be a buffer overflow.

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Passing Strings to Functions

Strings can be passed to a function in a similar way as arrays. Learn more about passing arrays to a function.

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Example 3: Passing string to a Function

#include <stdio.h>
void displayString(char str[]);

int main()
{
    char str[50];
    printf("Enter string: ");
    fgets(str, sizeof(str), stdin);             
    displayString(str);     // Passing string to a function.    
    return 0;
}
void displayString(char str[])
{
    printf("String Output: ");
    puts(str);
}

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Strings and Pointers

Comparable like arrays, string names are “decayed” to pointers. Thus, you can use pointers to control components of the string. We prescribed you to check C Arrays and Pointers before you check this example.

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Example 4: Strings and Pointers

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
  char name[] = "salman";

  printf("%c", *name);     // Output: H
  printf("%c", *(name+1));   // Output: a
  printf("%c", *(name+7));   // Output: o

  char *namePtr;

  namePtr = name;
  printf("%c", *namePtr);     // Output: H
  printf("%c", *(namePtr+1));   // Output: a
  printf("%c", *(namePtr+7));   // Output: o

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Please feel free to give your comment if you face any difficulty here.

C Programming Strings