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

Common operations on strings – the standard library

Just as for characters, the C standard library provides some useful operations on strings. These are declared in the string.h header file. We will take a brief look at these functions here and then incorporate them into working programs in later chapters to do various interesting things.

Common functions

If you carried out one of the experiments in the earlier sections of this chapter, you will have already encountered the strlen() function, which counts the number of characters (excluding the terminating NUL character) in a given string. The following is a list of some useful functions and what they do:

  • Copy, append, and cut strings:
    • strcat(): Concatenates two strings. This appends a copy of one null-terminated string to the end of a target null-terminated string, then adds a terminating `\0' character. The target string must...