Character Arrays and strings in c language

CHARACTER ARRAYS AND STRINGS
-Kishore Kumar

STRINGS
• A string is a collection of characters that are enclosed within double quotes (" ").
• A string can also be called a character array.*It can be treated as a single data item
and terminated by null character '0’.
• C language does not support strings as a data type.
• A string is actually one - dimensional array of characters in C language.
Example:
The String "good" contains 5 characters including '0' character which
is automatically added by the compiler at the end of the string.

STRINGS
Declaring and initializing a string variable:
There are different ways to initialize a character array variable
Remember when you initialize a character array by listing all of its character
separately then you must supply the ‘0’ character explicitly

STRINGS
Some invalid ways to initialize a character array

STRING INPUT AND OUTPUT:
• Input function scanf() can be used with %s format specifier to read a a string input from the
terminal but there’s a problem with it, it terminates its input on the first whitespace it
encounters
• However, C supports a format specification known as the edit set conversion code %[..] that
can be used to read a line containing a variety of characters, including white spaces

STRING HANDLING FUNCTIONS:
• C language supports a large number of string handling functions that can be used
to carry out many of the string manipulations.
• The operations such as copying a string, joining two strings, extracting a portion of
the string, determining the length of a string, etc., cannot be done using arithmetic
operators.
• The string-based library functions are used to program this type of operations and
they are located in the header file <string.h> , it should be included in the program
to access the functions.

Method Description
It is used to concatenate(combine) two strings
strlen() It is used to show length of a string
strrev() It is used to show reverse of a string
strcpy() Copies one string into another
strcmp() It is used to compare two strings
strcat()

We are not able to use + operator to join two strings. The function strcat( ) is used for joining two
strings.
strcat():
Syntax:
strcat(s1,s2);
Example:
Output:
kishorekumar
;

the function, strlen( ) is used to find the length of the given string.
strln():
Syntax:
strlen(str);
Example:
Output:
5

The strrev( ) function is used to reverse the given string expression.
strrev():
Syntax:
strrev(s1);
Example:
Output:
Enter your string:Kishore
Your reversed strings is erohisk

The function strcpy( ) is used to copy the content of one string into another.
strcpy():
Syntax:
strcpy(s1);
Example:
Output:
StudyTonight

The function is used to compare two strings. To compare any numeric values we use relational
operators. By using these operators we cannot compare strings. The strcmp( ) performs the function of
comparison.
strcmp():
Syntax:
strcmp(s1,s2);
NOTE:
The result of comparison is obtained by calculating the difference between the ASCII values of the
corresponding characters.
• Where s1 and s2 are string variables. This function returns any one of
the three possible results.
• Result is 0 when both the strings are equal. (s1=s2)
• Result is Positive value, if s1 is greater than s2.(s1>s2)
• Result is Negative if s1 is less than s2.(s1<s2)

The function is used to compare two strings. To compare any numeric values we use relational
operators. By using these operators we cannot compare strings. The strcmp( ) performs the function of
comparison.
strcmp():
Example:
Output:
1

READ AND WRITE STRINGS IN C:
Different methods to read and write strings in C:
• gets() and fgets() function are used to read the strings in C
• Strings in C can be displayed using puts() and fputs() functions
and also printf() function can be used with %s format code
• fscant() and fprint() functions are used to get input and display the
the output in c respectively

Character Arrays and strings in c language

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