Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job, Second Edition

Chapter 6. Arrays and Strings

Arrays and strings are closely related. In the abstract sense, a string is really just an array (possibly read-only) of characters. Most of the string-manipulation problems you'll encounter are therefore based on your understanding of array data types, particularly in languages such as C and C++ in which strings and character arrays are essentially identical. Although other languages — especially the object-oriented ones such as C# and Java — consider strings and character arrays to be separate, there's always a way to convert a string to an array and vice versa. When the two are different, however, it's very important to understand where and why they diverge. In addition, not all array problems will involve strings, so understanding how arrays work in the abstract and how they're implemented by the language you're using is absolutely crucial to answering those array-focused problems.