Introduction to strings

In C programming, a string is a sequence of characters stored in consecutive memory locations. Each character in a string is represented using the ASCII code. C does not have a built-in string data type like some other programming languages, but instead, strings are represented as arrays of characters.

To declare and work with strings in C, you need to include the <string.h> header file, which contains various string manipulation functions.

Here's a step-by-step introduction to working with strings in C:

Declaring a string:

To declare a string, you create an array of characters. For example:

char myString[20]; // This declares a string of size 20, which can hold 19 characters plus the null terminator.

Initializing a string:

You can initialize a string at the time of declaration:

char greeting[] = "Hello, world!";

Assigning values to a string:

You can assign values to a string using the assignment operator or functions like strcpy():

char name[50];

strcpy(name, "John");

String Input:

You can read input from the user and store it in a string using functions like scanf():

char input[100];

printf("Enter your name: ");

scanf("%s", input);

String Output:

To print a string, you can use the %s format specifier with printf():

char message[] = "Welcome!";

printf("%s\n", message);

String Functions:

C provides several functions to manipulate strings in the <string.h> library. Some commonly used string functions are:

strlen(): Calculates the length of a string.

strcmp(): Compares two strings.

strcat(): Concatenates two strings.

strcpy(): Copies one string to another.

Here's an example using some of the string functions: