Book Image

Learn C Programming - Second Edition

By : Jeff Szuhay
Book Image

Learn C Programming - Second Edition

By: Jeff Szuhay

Overview of this book

The foundation for many modern programming languages such as C++, C#, JavaScript, and Go, C is widely used as a system programming language as well as for embedded systems and high-performance computing. With this book, you'll be able to get up to speed with C in no time. The book takes you through basic programming concepts and shows you how to implement them in the C programming language. Throughout the book, you’ll create and run programs that demonstrate essential C concepts, such as program structure with functions, control structures such as loops and conditional statements, and complex data structures. As you make progress, you’ll get to grips with in-code documentation, testing, and validation methods. This new edition expands upon the use of enumerations, arrays, and additional C features, and provides two working programs based on the code used in the book. What's more, this book uses the method of intentional failure, where you'll develop a working program and then purposely break it to see what happens, thereby learning how to recognize possible mistakes when they happen. By the end of this C programming book, you’ll have developed basic programming skills in C that can be easily applied to other programming languages and have gained a solid foundation for you to build on as a programmer.
Table of Contents (38 chapters)
1
Part 1: C Fundamentals
10
Part 2: Complex Data Types
19
Part 3: Memory Manipulation
22
Part 4: Input and Output
28
Part 5: Building Blocks for Larger Programs

Chapter 15: Working with Strings

In C, a string is an array with two special properties. First, a string is made up of only characters. Second, the string must conclude with an essential terminating character – the NUL character. While some would say strings are one of C's weakest features, I disagree with that assessment. Because strings build on already-established mechanisms, I believe that they are rather elegant in an unexpected way.

Not all values that we might want to manipulate in a program are numbers. Often, we need to manipulate words, phrases, and sentences; these are built from strings of characters. We have been getting output using simple strings in printf() statements. To input strings and numbers, we need to be able to manipulate strings even further so that we can convert them into values. In this chapter, we will explore the elements and building blocks of C strings, as well as various ways to use and manipulate C...