Thread: Hi everyone..Testing strings and if question

Hello all,
What is wrong with this code? I can't get Wow! to print if the user answers "truck."

Code:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

main()
{
char veh[6];

cout << "Do you drive a car or a truck?" << "\n";
cin >> veh;

if(veh == "truck")
   {cout << "Wow!" <<  "\n";}

return 0;
}

That's not how you compare strings. Use strcmp instead.

Code:

if( !strcmp(veh, "truck") ) /* strcmp returns 0 if veh equals to "truck" */
    cout << "Wow!" <<  "\n";

So what CAN I compare in an "if" statement?

veh is the address of the first element in the array.
"truck" is the address of the first element in another character array, stored somewhere in read-only memory. So what you're really doing is comparing two different addresses, and not the strings as you might think.

You're a genius! Thank you, I appreciate it a lot.

This tutorial helped me with strings.