Overview

In this tutorial, we will learn about C Strings. Strings are a sequence of characters. C language has no in-built string data type. A string is stored in an array of characters.

Declare a String

The general syntax to declare a string in the C language is as follows:

char <string_variable_name>[size];

For example to declare an eleven-character string:

char str[12];

The storage space must contain space for the string data and the space for the string delimiter.

Initialize a String

We can declare and initialize a string at the same time. We can initialize the string, in the same way, that we initialize any variable by assigning a value to it when it is defined. For example, we can define a string and store the value “TestingDocs”, as shown below.

char str[12] = “TestingDocs”;

The value “TestingDocs” enclosed within double quotes is known as a string literal. Also, if we initialize the string we do not need to specify the size of the array. For example,

char name[] = “Emma”;

Example

Let’s declare two strings and print the strings to the console in the below program:

/**
**********************************
* Program Description:
*   C Strings Demo Program
* Filename  : stringDemo.c
* C Tutorials - www.TestingDocs.com
*************************************
*/
#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
    // Declare string variable
    char str[12] = "TestingDocs";
    char name[] = "Emma";

    printf("%s \n",str);// print str
    printf("%s \n",name);// print name
    return 0;
} // end main