C Primer Plus®, Third Edition

Character Strings: An Introduction

A character string is a series of one or more characters. Here is an example of a string:

"Zing went the strings of my heart!"

The double quotation marks are not part of the string. They inform the compiler that they enclose a string, just as single quotation marks identify a character.

Type char Arrays and the Null Character

C has no special variable type for strings. Instead, strings are stored in an array of type char. Characters in a string are stored in adjacent memory cells, one character per cell, and an array consists of adjacent memory locations, so placing a string in an array is quite natural (see Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1. A string is an array.

Note that Figure 4.1 shows the character \0 in ...