[<3DIC]

How can i loop through a char array in c?

will something like this work?

for (i = 0; i < sizeof(input); i++)

[KYA]

strlen() is better. You'll only traverse through actual data.

[NickDMax]

Generally sizeof() is not much use with c-string which are "zero-terminated char arrays".

So that means I may allocation 100 bytes in a static array of chars -- but that may only hold the string: "Hello" which is: {'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0' }

note that the end of a c-string (zero-terminated char array) is always a '\0' char (value 0x00). You can use this knowledge to scroll though the chars in a string:

char str[] = "I had a tiny turtle";
for(int i = 0; str[i] != '\0'; ++i) {
    str[i] = toupper(str[i]);
}

The loop will look for the '\0' char and exit when it is found.

if you need to know the length of a string you can use strlen()

[legadema]

yup use strlen, unless u want to go throughout the entire array

char str[20]= "hello";

cout << sizeof(str) << endl;
cout << strlen(str) << endl;

this outputs 20 and 4

[Oler1s]

I hope you don't just memorize "use strlen". Think about what strlen actually does.

Strlen walks through the array, counting until it hits a '\0', and then returns the count. So here are the things to think about:

- If the array does not contain a C string, you have no guarantee that strlen will stop at the array bound (because there's no guarantee of a '\0'). Consequently, you can index out of the array and that's undefined behavior.
- If you are looking to get the size of the array, you can't do that with strlen. That's because it only counts up to the first occurence of '\0'. Unless you happen to have a array that's exactly sized to a contained C string, it's not going to give you the array size.
- And if you really wanted strlen, using it to derive the upper limit in a for loop isn't necessarily sensible. You walk through the array once to get the length, and then you walk through it again. Talk about inefficiency.

So, think about these things.

[codeprada]

an even shorter way of iterating char arrays is

while(*input)
        printf("%c", *input++);

This post has been edited by codeprada: 16 March 2011 - 05:33 AM