Bethlehem Moravian College

Department of Computer Science

C Programming

Characters and String

A string is a sequence of characters. Any sequence or set of characters defined within double quotation
symbols is a constant string. In c it is required to do some meaningful operations on strings they are:
● Reading string displaying strings
● Combining or concatenating strings
● Copying one string to another.
● Comparing string & checking whether they are equal
● Extraction of a portion of a string

Initializing Strings
Following the discussion on characters arrays, the initialization of a string must the following form which
is simpler to one dimension array.
char month1[ ]={‘j’,’a’,’n’,’u’,’a’,’r’,’y’};
Then the string month is initializing to January. This is perfectly valid but C offers a special way to
initialize strings. The above string can be initialized char month1[]=”January”; The characters of the
string are enclosed within a part of double quotes. The compiler takes care of string enclosed within a
pair of a double quotes. The compiler takes care of storing the ASCII codes of characters of the string
in the memory and also stores the null terminator in the end.
/*String.c string variable*/
#include < stdio.h >
main()
{
char month[15];
printf (“Enter the string”);
gets (month);
printf (“The string entered is %s”, month);
}
In this example string is stored in the character variable month the string is displayed in the statement.
printf(“The string entered is %s”, month”);
It is one dimension array.
A string variable is any valid C variable name & is always declared as an array. The general form of
declaration of a string variable is
char string_name[size];

The size determines the number of characters in the string name.

Example:
char month[10];
char address[100];

The size of the array should be one byte more than the actual space occupied by the string since the
compiler appends a null character at the end of the string.

Reading Strings from the terminal:

The function scanf with %s format specification is needed to read the character string from the terminal.
Example:
char address[15];
scanf(“%s”,address);

Scanf statement has a drawback it just terminates the statement as soon as it finds a blank space,
suppose if we type the string new york then only the string new will be read and since there is a blank
space after word “new” it will terminate the string.

Note that we can use the scanf without the ampersand symbol before the variable name.
In many applications it is required to process text by reading an entire line of text from the terminal.
The function getchar can be used repeatedly to read a sequence of successive single characters and
store it in the array.
We cannot manipulate strings since C does not provide any operators for string. For instance we cannot
assign one string to another directly.

For example:
String=”xyz”;
String1=string2;
Are not valid. To copy the chars in one string to another string we may do so on a character to
character basis.

Writing strings to screen:

The printf statement along with format specifier %s to print strings on to the screen. The format %s can
be used to display an array of characters that is terminated by the null character for example
printf(“%s”,name); can be used to display the entire contents of the array name.
String operations (string.h)
C language recognizes that string is a different class of array by letting us input and output the array as a
unit and are terminated by null character. C library supports a large number of string handling functions
that can be used to array out many o f the string manipulations such as:

● Length (number of characters in the string).

● Concatentation (adding two are more strings)
● Comparing two strings.
● Substring (Extract substring from a given string)
● Copy(copies one string over another)
To do all the operations described here it is essential to include string.h library header file in the
program.

strlen() function:
This function counts and returns the number of characters in a string. The length does not include a null
character.
Syntax n=strlen(string);
Where n is integer variable. Which receives the value of length of the string.
Example
length=strlen(“Hollywood”);
The function will assign number of characters 9 in the string to a integer variable length.

/*write a c program to find the length of the string using strlen() function*/

#include < stdio.h >

include < string.h >
void main()
{
char name[100];
int length;
printf(“Enter the string”);
gets(name);
length=strlen(name);
printf(“\nNumber of characters in the string is=%d”,length);
}
strcat() function:
when you combine two strings, you add the characters of one string to the end of other string. This
process is called concatenation. The strcat() function joins 2 strings together. It takes the following form
strcat(string1,string2)
string1 & string2 are character arrays. When the function strcat is executed string2 is appended to
string1. the string at string2 remains unchanged.
Example
strcpy(string1,”sri”);
strcpy(string2,”Bhagavan”);
Printf(“%s”,strcat(string1,string2);
From the above program segment the value of string1 becomes sribhagavan. The string at str2 remains
unchanged as bhagawan.

strcmp function:
In c you cannot directly compare the value of 2 strings in a condition like if(string1==string2)
Most libraries however contain the strcmp() function, which returns a zero if 2 strings are equal, or a
non zero number if the strings are not the same. The syntax of strcmp() is given below:
Strcmp(string1,string2)
String1 & string2 may be string variables or string constants. String1, & string2 may be string variables
or string constants some computers return a negative if the string1 is alphabetically less than the second
and a positive number if the string is greater than the second.
Example:
strcmp(“Newyork”,”Newyork”) will return zero because 2 strings are equal.
strcmp(“their”,”there”) will return a 9 which is the numeric difference between ASCII ‘i’ and ASCII ’r’.
strcmp(“The”, “the”) will return 32 which is the numeric difference between ASCII “T” & ASCII “t”.

strcmpi() function
This function is same as strcmp() which compares 2 strings but not case sensitive.
Example
strcmpi(“THE”,”the”); will return 0.

strcpy() function:
C does not allow you to assign the characters to a string directly as in the statement name=”Robert”;
Instead use the strcpy(0 function found in most compilers the syntax of the function is illustrated below.
strcpy(string1,string2);
Strcpy function assigns the contents of string2 to string1. string2 may be a character array variable or a
string constant.
strcpy(Name,”Robert”);
In the above example Robert is assigned to the string called name.

strlwr () function:
This function converts all characters in a string from uppercase to lowercase.
syntax
strlwr(string);
For example:
strlwr(“EXFORSYS”) converts to Exforsys.

strrev() function:
This function reverses the characters in a string.
Syntax
strrev(string);
For ex strrev(“program”) reverses the characters in a string into “margrop”.1

strupr() function:
This function converts all characters in a string from lower case to uppercase.
Syntax
strupr(string);
For example strupr(“exforsys”) will convert the string to EXFORSYS.
/* Example program to use string functions*/
#include < stdio.h >
#include < string.h >
void main()
{
char s1[20],s2[20],s3[20];
int x,l1,l2,l3;
printf(“Enter the strings”);
scanf(“%s%s”,s1,s2);
x=strcmp(s1,s2);
if(x!=0)
{printf(“\nStrings are not equal\n”);
strcat(s1,s2);
}
else
printf(“\nStrings are equal”);
strcpy(s3,s1);
l1=strlen(s1);

1
Department of Computer Science C Programming
l2=strlen(s2);
l3=strlen(s3);
printf(“\ns1=%s\t length=%d characters\n”,s1,l1);
printf(“\ns2=%s\t length=%d characters\n”,s2,l2);
printf(“\ns3=%s\t length=%d characters\n”,s3,l3);
}

End