Effective C, 2nd Edition

7 CHARACTERS AND STRINGS

Strings are such an important and useful data type that nearly every programming language implements them in some form. Often used to represent text, strings constitute most of the data exchanged between an end user and a program, including text input fields, command line arguments, environment variables, and console input.

In C, the string data type is modeled on the idea of a formal string (Hopcroft and Ullman 1979):

Let Σ be a non-empty finite set of characters, called the alphabet. A string over Σ is any finite sequence of characters from Σ. For example, if Σ = {0, 1}, then 01011 is a string over Σ.

In this ...