C programming tutorial strings and pointers

Table of Contents

In the previous lesson, you learned about C string and how they are important to manipulate text in a C program. In this article, you will learn how strings can be accessed and used with pointers.

Learn C programming basics and pointer concepts before you begin with this lesson. If you are familiar with them, skip and continue reading the next section.

Pointer is a special variable that can store the value of string constant, just like character array. But, there are some advantages of using pointers.

Let us see the initialization of string constant.

char manager[20] = "David";
char *p = "Harry";

Both methods is simple and straightforward, but you cannot assign another string to a character array. It is only possible with pointers.

For example,

char manager[20] = "Bruce";
char supervisor[20];
char *p = "Mary";
char *s;
supervisor[20] = manager[20]; /* will give error */
*s = *p;                      /* No error */
*s = "Tang";               /* is valid */
supervisor[20]= "George";  /* Not valid */

Accessing Characters in a String

The most popular method to access individual characters from a string is treating the string like an array and loop through each character.

For example,

int i = 0;
while(name[i] != '\0'){
    printf("%c", name[i]);
}
getch();
return 0;
}

You can do the same with pointers. Consider the pointer version of above.

char *p = "elephant";
int i;
while (*p!= '\0')
{
  printf("%c",*p);
  p++;
}

The output of both is going to be same.

String and Pointer Example Program

The following program does all the string manipulation we discussed in the article.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main()
{
    char fruit[20] = "APPLE";
    char *p = "ELEPHANT";
    char *s;
    int i;
    s = p;
  
    while (*s!= '\0')
    {
         printf("%c",*s);
         s++;
    }
  
    printf("\n\n");
    /* Standard Array Technique */
    i = 0;
    while( fruit[i] != '\0')
    {
         printf("%c", fruit[i]);
         i++;
    }
    printf("\n\n");
  
system("PAUSE"); 
return 0;
}

Output

ELEPHANT
APPLE 
Press any key to continue . . .

C Strings And Pointers

Accessing Characters in a String

String and Pointer Example Program

Output