Strings are 1-dimensional arrays of characters
In contrast to some other programming languages,
C does not have a basic datatype for strings.
However, C compilers provide some basic support for strings by considering
strings to simply be arrays of characters.
We've already seen this support when calling the printf()
function:
printf("I'm afraid I can't do that Dave\n");
The double quotation characters simply envelope the characters to be
treated as a sequence of characters.
In addition,
a standards' conforming C compiler is required to also provide a large
number of string-handling functions in its standard C library.
Examples include:
#include <string.h>
// which declares many functions, including:
int strlen( char string[] ); // to determine the length of a string
int strcmp( char str1[], char str2[] ); // to determine if two strings are equal
char *strcpy( char destination[], char source[] ); // to make a copy of a string
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In reality these functions are not "really" managing strings as a basic
datatype,
but are just managing arrays of characters.
CITS2002 Systems Programming, Lecture 5, p5, 5th August 2024.
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CITS2002