Sitting in Programming lecture confused as hell

[Wayne Geissinger]

so I'm sitting in lecture right now and have no idea what a C-string is... Treat me like I'm 5 years old and explain it please! ?

[WkdPaul]

oops, locked by mistake!

My bad!

 

Carry on!

[WkdPaul]

Moved to programming!

 

Again, sorry about mistakenly locking the thread! 

[fizzlesticks]

An array of characters that ends with a null terminator ('\0').

[Wayne Geissinger]

19 minutes ago, fizzlesticks said:

An array of characters that ends with a null terminator ('\0').

Literally, that's it? My professor rambled for an HOUR about memory locations and crap, and it's just a character array with a terminator? Thanks. lol

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Wayne Geissinger said:

Literally, that's it? My professor rambled for an HOUR about memory locations and crap, and it's just a character array with a terminator? Thanks. lol

Well, it's important to know that a C string is an array. So you can do fun things like:

char greeting[6] = {'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0'};
char * foobar = (char *)greeting;

foobar ++;
*foobar = 'a';

And that'll change the string to "Hallo". Of course you could just do

greeting[1] = 'a';

Anyway, make sure that the string ends in a \0, otherwise if you try to print it, it'll just barf data.

 

EDIT: However, this is a dangerous kind of C string

char *string_1 = "Hello";

This is treated as a read-only string. If you attempt to modify it, you'll get a segfault.