C Primer Plus, Fourth Edition

Key Concepts

Many programs deal with text data. A program may ask you to enter your name, a list of corporations, an address, the botanical name for a type of fern, the cast of a musical, or—well, because we interact with the world using words, there's really no end to examples using text. And strings are the means a C program uses to handle strings.

A C string, whether it be identified by a character array, a pointer or a string literal, is stored as a series of bytes containing character codes, and the sequence is terminated by the null character. C recognizes the usefulness of strings by providing a library of functions for manipulating them, searching them, and analyzing them. In particular, keep in mind that you should use strcmp() instead ...