📘 C Strings: What Are They?

In C, strings are arrays of characters ending with a special null character '\0'.

char str[] = "hello";  // Actually stored as: {'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\\0'}

🔧 Section 1: Declaring Strings

✅ Example 1: Static Declaration

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    char str1[] = "Hello";
    printf("%s\\n", str1);
    return 0;
}

✅ Example 2: Using char (pointer to string literal)*

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    const char* str2 = "World"; // immutable!
    printf("%s\\n", str2);
    return 0;
}

🔧 Section 2: Input/Output

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    char name[100];

    printf("Enter your name: ");
    scanf("%s", name);  // Note: reads until space
    printf("Hello, %s!\\n", name);

    return 0;
}

⚠️ Limitation: scanf stops at space. To read full lines, use fgets.

🔧 Section 3: String Functions (<string.h>)

🔹 Common functions: strlen, strcpy, strcat, strcmp

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

int main() {
    char str1[100] = "Hello";
    char str2[] = "World";

    // strlen
    printf("Length of str1: %lu\\n", strlen(str1));

    // strcat
    strcat(str1, str2);
    printf("After strcat: %s\\n", str1);  // HelloWorld

    // strcpy
    char copy[100];
    strcpy(copy, str1);
    printf("Copied: %s\\n", copy);

    // strcmp
    int result = strcmp(str1, copy);
    printf("Compare result: %d\\n", result);  // 0 if equal

    return 0;
}