C Programming

CHARACTER ARRAYS [STRINGS]
Consider the following program,


	#include <stdio.h>
	main()
	{
		static char name1[] = {'H','e','l','l','o'};
		static char name2[] = "Hello";
		printf("%s\n", name1);
		printf("%s\n", name2);
	}


	Sample Program Output
	Helloxghifghjkloqw30-=kl`'
	Hello

The difference between the two arrays is that name2 has a null placed at the end of the string, ie, in name2[5], whilst name1 has not. This can often result in garbage characters being printed on the end. To insert a null at the end of the name1 array, the initialization can be changed to,


	static char name1[] = {'H','e','l','l','o','\0'};

Consider the following program, which initialises the contents of the character based array word during the program, using the function strcpy, which necessitates using the include file string.h


	#include <stdio.h>
	#include <string.h>

	main()
	{
		char word[20];

		strcpy( word, "hi there." );
		printf("%s\n", word );
	}


	Sample Program Output
	hi there.