Thread: Question on character arrays

Is it possible to do the following?

Code:

char s[] = " hello my name is john";

And then to print, not the entire sentence, but only "hello" and then on another line to print "name" and etc.

I'm not sure if this is possible since a char is an array and it stores each letter and the null character seperately. It doesn't recognize whole words.

Can this be done with sscanf maybe?

I'd make a for loop and print out a '\n' each time a space ' ' is encountered.

Well you could have an array of string literals or something:

Code:

char *words[] = { "hello", "my", "name", "is", "john" };

You could also tokenize a string and build an array of words using something like a two-dimensional array of chars.

Originally Posted by citizen

Well you could have an array of string literals or something:

Code:

char *words[] = { "hello", "my", "name", "is", "john" };

You could also tokenize a string and build an array of words using something like a two-dimensional array of chars.

Cool I didn't know you could do that. Thats what I mean. What would I use to select each seperate word? Can you give me a sample printf statement with

Code:

char *words[] = { "hello", "my", "name", "is", "john" };

Well you would use it like an array. Because the element type is a char* you can print it with the %s modifier for printf.

This just prints hello though. What If I want to print "name"? Doesn't the pointer only point to the first element of the array?

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

int main( void )
{
	char *words[] = { "hello", "my", "name", "is", "john" };
	


	printf("&#37;s", *words);

An array isn't just a pointer to the first element. The compiler actually sets aside the space for all the elements in a static array like the one we are using here. Arrays merely become pointers to the first element in pointer contexts, like when you try to pass an array to a function or access an element. The rest of the time, it is in an array context.

So hopefully that explains why *words prints the first element, because you're using an array in a pointer context. As for printing individual elements:

Originally Posted by citizen

Well you would use it like an array. Because the element type is a char* you can print it with the %s modifier for printf.

So if you wanted to print the first word, words[0], the second word is words[1], and so on until you reach the array end, words[N - 1].