C Characters

programming C MOC

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C stores strings of characters as bytes in the char data type.

#include <stdio.h>
 
int main() {
	char sentence[] = "My first variable";
	puts(sentence);
	
	char letter = 'M'
	printf("Character %c is decimal %d\n", letter, letter);
	// Prints: "Character M is decimal 77"
 
	return(0);
}

The variable sentence is declared as an array by the [].

The Null Terminator

The null terminator, \0, is added automatically to character arrays and signifies the end of the array. It should be added when creating the character array directly, otherwise it reads adjacent memory.

#include <stdio.h>
 
int main() {
	char hello_pieces[6] = {'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0'}
	puts(hello_pieces);
	return(0);
}

String Handling

The string.h library is very common for editing strings.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
 
int main()
{
    char str1[] = "Some text";
    char str2[] = "";
    printf("str1 is %ld characters long\n", sizeof(str1));
 
    // Using functions from string.h
    printf("str1 is %ld characters long\n", strlen(str1));
    strcpy(str2, str1);
    printf("str2 now has value '%s', the same as str1\n", str2);
    char str3[] = "Joined ";
    char str4[] = "Text";
    strcat(str3, str4);
    printf("Concatenated str4 after str3: %s", str3);
 
    return 0;
}