CSE-105: Structured Programming Language

Shahriar Rahman Khan

Lecturer, Department of CSE, MIST
Email: shahriarkhan@cse.mist.ac.bd

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 Lec 9-11: String in C

PREPARED BY
SHAHRIAR RAHMAN KHAN
Lecturer, Department of CSE, MIST
 Character Arrays

» Character array - an array whose components are of type char

» A Character array is a sequence of the characters that are stored in consecutive
memory addresses.
» In a character array, a particular character can be accessed by its index.

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C Strings (Character Arrays)

» String - a sequence of zero or more characters enclosed in double quote marks

» The last character in a string is the null character (‘\0’) that terminates the string.
» There is a difference between 'A' and "A"
» 'A' is the character A
» "A" is the string A
» Because strings are null terminated, "A" represents two characters, 'A' and '\0‘
» Similarly, "Hello" contains six characters, 'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', and '\0'

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 Character Array
» The most common use of the one-dimensional array in C programming is
character array
» Declaration of character array:
char array_name [array_size];

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 Initializing Character Array
» Suppose you want to store the word ‘hello’ in a character array. How will you do
that?
» Step 1: declare character array of size 5 (five characters)
» Store the first character ‘h’ in array index 0
» Store the other characters in the same way

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 Character Array Printing
» store the word ‘hello’ in a character array and print it

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 Character Array Printing
» store the word ‘hello’ in a character array and print it

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
char values[]= {'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'};
int i;
printf("\n");
for (i = 0; i<9; i++)
{
printf("%c ", values[i]);
}
return 0;
}

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What is String?

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 String in C

» String is a sequence of characters that are treated as a single data item and
terminated by a null character '\0'.
» Remember that the C language does not support strings as a data type.
» A string is actually a one-dimensional array of characters in C language. These
are often used to create meaningful and readable programs.

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 String in C
» String is defined as a NULL terminated character array.
» One basic difference between character array and string is, string MUST be
terminated by a null character.

Character Array h e l l o

String h e l l o \0

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 Initializing String
» Suppose you want to store the word ‘hello’ in a string. How will you do that?
» Step 1: declare character array of size 6 (five characters + null)
» Store the first character ‘h’ in array index 0
» Store the other characters in the same way

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Initializing String

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 String Input - Output
» Format specifier for string input output is : “%s”
» Take input of a string and print it
Note: The ‘&’ is not required in string input.
'&' is used to get the address of the variable. C
does not have a string type, String is just an
array of characters and an array variable stores
the address of the first index location.

Input: Output:
hello h e l l o \0
hello
Note: When you take input of a string, you do not have to put the null character
explicitly. The compiler does it itself.
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 String Input - Output
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
char values[6];
int i;
scanf("%s",values);
printf("%s is the string and %d the base address\n", values, values);
printf("%d the base address\n", &values[0]);
return 0;
}

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 String Input - Output
» Suppose you want to take input of a sentence like “hello world” using scanf
statement, what you would do?
○ Declare a string of size 12
○ Take input using scanf
» Print the output

h e l l o w o r l d \0

What will be the output?

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String Input - Output

What we did wrong in this code?

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 String Input - Output
» scanf terminates if it encounters any white space during taking input
» White space examples: space, tabs, carriage return, newline etc
» In the previous code, when we entered a space(“ “) after the word “hello” scanf
statement terminated, means it stopped taking any further input
» That’s why our output printed upto the word “hello”
» How to solve this problem?
» C programming provides i/o functions to allow taking input and printing output
with whitespace
○ gets() for taking input with whitespaces
○ puts() for printing output with whitespaces
○ edit set conversion code %[..] that can be used to read a line containing a
variety of characters, including white spaces.

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String Input - Output

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 Accessing Elements in a String
Consider the following String:
h e l l o w o r l d \0
❏ The first character ‘h’ is in Index 0
❏ The last character ‘d’ is in index 10

❏ You can access any element at any index just like a character array

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 String Problems
» Input a string and print it.
» Find the length of a string without using library function.
» Print individual characters of string in reverse order.
» Count the total number of words in a string.
» Compare two strings
» Take two strings as input and print out the concatenation of the input strings.
» Count total number of vowel or consonant in a string.
» Find maximum occurring character in a string.
» Sort a string array in ascending order.
» Read a string through keyboard and sort it using bubble sort.
» Extract a substring from a given string.
» Check whether a given substring is present in the given string.
» Read a sentence and replace lowercase characters by uppercase and vice-versa.

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 String Example 1
Take input of a string and calculate its length

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 String Example 2
Take input of a sentence and calculate the number of words in it [Assume there is
no space before the first word, every other word is separated by a single space]

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 String Example 3
Take two strings as input and copy the elements of string 2 in string 1.

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 String Example 4
Take two strings as input and print out the concatenation of the input strings

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 String Handling Functions
C/C++ have multiple built in function to make your life easier. There is a library named
<string.h>, which needs to be included in your c program to use these functions.

Function
strlen(string_name)
Strcpy(string1 , string2 )
Strcat(dest, src)
Strcmp(string1 , string2)
Strlwr(string_name)
Strupr(string_name)
Strrev(string_name)
Description
Can compute the length of the string
Can copy the content of a string to
another
Is used to concatenate or join two
strings
Can compare two strings
Can convert the string to lowercase
Is used to convert the letters of string
to uppercase
Is used to reverse the string

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strlen() Function

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strcpy() Function

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 strcmp() Function
strcmp( string1, string2 ) //compares both string and returns:

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 strcmp() Function
strcmp( string1, string2 ) //compares both string and returns:

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strcmp() Function

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strcat() Function

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strrev() Function

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 GOOD NEWS!
T H E CL A S S
I S O V E R…
THANK YOU!

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