CS 116 Computing Fundamentals

Strings (1)
Introduction

Most of the slides in this lecture are either from or adapted from the slides provided by Dr. Christina Class
 Character Variable

 A character char is a single ‘character’ or

symbol.
 As literal constant it is included in single
quotation marks ‘ ’
 char x = ‘a’;

A variable of a
A literal constant
character type

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 getchar() and putchar()

 getchar() and putchar() are functions to

read / print one single character.
 they are also declared in stdio.h
 examples:
 char c = ‘4’;
 putchar(c); Print the value of c into the screen

 c = getchar(); Request the user to input a literal value to be stored into c

 putchar(c); Print the value of c into the screen

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 Reading and Printing a
character

using scanf() & printf() using getchar() & putchar()

#include <stdio.h> #include <stdio.h>

int main(void) { int main(void) {

char x; char x;

printf("Please enter a character: "); printf("Please enter a character: ");

scanf("%c", &x); x = getchar();
Equivalent Operations

printf("You entered "); printf("You entered ");

printf("%c", x); Equivalent Operations
putchar(x);

return 0; return 0;
} }

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  Each character is stored as an int (ASCII code).
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
char x;

printf("Please enter a character: ");

x = getchar();//equivalent to scanf

printf("You entered ");

putchar(x);//equivalent to printf
printf("\n");
printf("%c %d", x, x);

return 0;
}

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String

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 A string is a character sequence and as
literal constant included in double
quotation marks “ ”.
 In some programming languages, there is an
extra data type for strings  not in C!
 In C, a string is implemented using an array
of characters.

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 In C programming, a string is a sequence of characters
terminated with a null character \0. For example:

 char c[] = "c string";

 When the compiler encounters a sequence of characters

enclosed in the double quotation marks, it appends a null
character \0 at the end by default.

 The previous string is similar to

 char c[] = {‘c’, ‘ ’, ‘s’, ‘t’, ‘r’, ‘n’, ‘g’, ‘\0’};

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 If we define a character array of length 80,
we can store different strings in this array,
e.g., “hello”, “Computing Fundamentals”,
“Today is Monday”, etc.
 In order to denote the end of a string, C
stores the string termination character ‘\0’
as last character in the array.
 If we initialize a character array with a string
literal, ‘\0’ is automatically appended at the
end of the string.
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 How to declare a string

 char s[5];

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 How to initialize strings?

 In the following example, we allocate an array

of 5 characters.
 char c[] = "abcd";
 char c[] = {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', '\0'};
 char c[5] = {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', '\0’};

 In the following example, we allocate an array

of 50 characters with only 5 filled elements.
 char c[50] = "abcd";
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 Assigning Values to Strings

 Arrays and strings are second-class citizens

in C; they do not support the assignment
operator once it is declared. For example,
char c[100];
c = “C Programming”; //Error! Array type is not assignable

char c[100] = “C Programming”;

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 Conversion specifier for strings

 The conversion specifier for strings is %s

 Important note about using scanf() with a string:
 You can use the scanf() function to read a string.
 The scanf() function reads the sequence of characters until it
encounters whitespace (e.g., space, newline, tab, etc.).
 The string does not require an address operator when using
it as an argument for the scanf() function.

char string[20] = “Hello!”;

printf(“%s\n”, string);
scanf(“%s”, string);
printf(“%s”, string);

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 scanf() to read a string

#include <stdio.h> Run #1:

int main()
Run #2:
{
char name[20];
printf("Enter name: ");
scanf("%s", name);
printf("Your name is %s.", name);
return 0;
}
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 important!

 used in printf:
 %s displays the whole string until the string
termination character.
 used in scanf:
 %s reads all characters (and stores them in the
array) until the next whitespace.
 “Hello World” cannot be input in one string using
%s
 if the input string is longer than the array it is to
be stored in, the program can crash
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 we can specify the max. length of characters to
be read between % and s
 char string[21];
 scanf(“%20s”, string);
 we use 20 instead of 21 in order to allow for the
string termination symbol to be stored
 all characters that are not read by scanf if used in
this way are buffered and will be used for the next
input
 if we want to avoid this:
 fflush(stdin);
after scanf empties the input buffer.

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#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
char s1[20] = "Hello";
char s2[] = "CS Students!";
printf("%s %s\n", s1, s2);

printf("Please enter a string (up to 19 characters):\n");

scanf("%s", s1);

printf("%s\n%s\n", s1, s2);

return 0;
}
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#include <stdio.h> What happen if the user
input more that 19
characters?
int main(void) {
char s1[20] = "Hello";
char s2[] = "CS Students!";
printf("%s %s\n", s1, s2);

printf("Please enter a string (up to 19 characters):\n");

scanf("%s", s1);

printf("%s\n%s\n", s1, s2);

return 0;
}
A run-time error!
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 the maximum allowed
characters?
#include <stdio.h> What happen if the user
input more that 19
characters?
int main(void) {
char s1[20] = "Hello";
char s2[] = "CS Students!";
printf("%s %s\n", s1, s2);

printf("Please enter a string (up to 19 characters):\n");

scanf("%19s", s1);

printf("%s\n%s\n", s1, s2);

return 0;
}

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String Manipulation Functions

Using user-defined function

 On the following slides we will discuss the
implementation of some string
manipulation functions.
 Most of them are also available in the
standard library and need not be
implemented directly.
 But the discussion of these functions is a
helpful revision of many C language
elements.
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 On all of the following slides, we assume
that the strings are correctly ended by a ‘\0’
 We equally assume that arrays are long
enough to store strings (e.g., the result
array in the stringConcat() function).

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 string length
int stringLength(char string[])
{
int i = 0;
while (string[i] != '\0') {
++i;
}
return i;
}

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 string concatenation
void stringConcat(char result[], const char string1[],
const char string2[])
{
int i, j;
i = 0;
while(string1[i] != '\0'){
result[i] = string1[i];
i++;
}
for (j=0; string2[j] != '\0'; j++){
result[i+j] = string2[j];
}
result[i+j] = '\0';
}

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 string equality
bool equalString(const char string1[], const char
string2[])
{
int i = 0;
while ((string1[i] != '\0') &&
(string2[i] != '\0') &&
(string1[i] == string2[i]))
++i;
if (string1[i] == '\0' && string2[i] == '\0')
return true;
else
return false;
}
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 Exercise

 Write a function upperCase that receives

one string and changes it to have upper
case letters only
 if the letter is lower case, then substract ‘a’-’A’
from it
 otherwise don’t modify it

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Exercise - Solution

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