simple question about strings

hello, I'm trying to learn about strings and I wrote this simple piece of code to try and print out: ABCD

but it prints out some weird characters after D

it puts out: ABCD "

and some other symbol not on my keyboard, does anyone know why?

thank you

here's the code I wrote:

Code:

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

main()    {
   
char string1 [] = { 'A' , 'B' , 'C' , 'D' } ;

printf("%s",string1);

getchar();

}

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In C, a string is a collection of characters terminated by the null character, which is simply the character with value zero. Your code has a collection of characters, but does not include a null character, so it's not a string. printf()'s %s conversion specifier expects a string (really, a pointer to one), so what you're passing causes undefined behavior. You could do:

Code:

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char string1[] = { 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 0 };

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You could also write this as:

Code:

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char string1[] = "ABCD";

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In this case, "ABCD" automatically includes the null character for you.

Your code results in undefined behavior, which technically means anything can happen. What's really happening, though, is that there is random junk after the 'D' in your array that printf() prints out. It will print out as much random junk as it can until it finds a null character, or if you're on a modern operating system, you try to read memory that's outside of your address space.

Edit: I'm too slow.

Strings in C need to be null terminated. You haven't terminated "string1" with a null character ('\0'), printf will keep reading from string1 until a null character is hit.

Try:

Code:

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char string1[] = { 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 0 };

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Or:

Code:

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char string1[] = "ABCD";

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In the second case, the string is implicitly null terminated.