Lvalue required error

[Dink87522]

I am trying to run the simple program below and are receiving the errors "Lvalue required in function main()" when I am trying to reassign the variable name to something else. Why and how would I go about this correctly?

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{

char name[100];
int i = 0;

printf("Please enter you're name \n");
printf(">>>");
scanf("%s", name);

if (name == "John") {
name = "George W. Bush";
}

if (name == "Doogie"){
name = "Clifford the big red dog";
}

for (i = 0; i < 1000; i++){
printf("Welcome %s! \n", name);
}

return 0;
}

[laserlight]

name is an array, thus you cannot assign to it (although you can assign to elements of name).

Also, you should not be using == to compare name with various string literals. Use strcmp() instead.

[Elysia]

String is not a type in C, it is an array. An array of characters.
To assign a name to a char array, use strcpy.
To compare two strings, use strcmp. Trying to compare two arrays will never get you the result you want.
Also read SourceForge.net: Scanf woes - cpwiki

[Dink87522]

Thanks for the tips with the strcpy and strcmp functions. I got the below working to some limited extent. How would I go about converting the user input to lowercase (i.e. if they enter john instead of John it obviously won't work). Also how do you generate a random number in C?

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main()
{

char name[100];
char name2[100];

printf("Please enter you're name \n");
printf(">>>");
scanf("%s", name);

if (strcmp (name, "John") == 0){
strcpy (name2, "George W. Bush");
}

else if (strcmp (name, "Doogie") == 0){
strcpy (name2, "Clifford the big red dog");
}

else
(strcpy (name2, name));

for (i = 0; i < 10; i++){
printf("Don't be an EMO %s! \n", name2);
}

return 0;
}

[kermit]

How would I go about converting the user input to lowercase (i.e. if they enter john instead of John it obviously won't work)

Look up toupper and tolower which are found in <ctype.h>. Or, if don't care about portability, you could use something like strcasecmp (case insensitive strcmp for Linux, FreeBSD, etc.), or whatever it is for Windows. I think it might be stricmp.

Also how do you generate a random number in C?

See here and here.