16.3 Strings

A string in C is a sequence of elements of type char, terminated with the null character, the character with code zero.

Programs often need to use strings with specific, fixed contents. To write one in a C program, use a string constant such as "Take me to your leader!". The data type of a string constant is char *. For the full syntactic details of writing string constants, String Constants.

To declare a place to store a non-constant string, declare an array of char. Keep in mind that it must include one extra char for the terminating null. For instance,

char text = { 'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 0 };

declares an array named ‘text’ with six elements—five letters and the terminating null character. An equivalent way to get the same result is this,

char text = "Hello";

which copies the elements of the string constant, including its terminating null character.

char message[200];

declares an array long enough to hold a string of 199 ASCII characters plus the terminating null character.

When you store a string into message be sure to check or prove that the length does not exceed its size. For example,

void
set_message (char *text)
{
  int i;
  for (i = 0; i < sizeof (message); i++)
    {
      message[i] = text[i];
      if (text[i] == 0)
        return;
    }
  fatal_error ("Message is too long for `message');
}

It’s easy to do this with the standard library function strncpy, which fills out the whole destination array (up to a specified length) with null characters. Thus, if the last character of the destination is not null, the string did not fit. Many system libraries, including the GNU C library, hand-optimize strncpy to run faster than an explicit for-loop.

Here’s what the code looks like:

void
set_message (char *text)
{
  strncpy (message, text, sizeof (message));
  if (message[sizeof (message) - 1] != 0)
    fatal_error ("Message is too long for `message');
}

See The GNU C Library in The GNU C Library Reference Manual, for more information about the standard library functions for operating on strings.

You can avoid putting a fixed length limit on strings you construct or operate on by allocating the space for them dynamically. See Dynamic Memory Allocation.