C: Strings (Page 1 of 6 )
We left off in our last tutorial noticing that the creators of C geared it towards numerics, and made it difficult to handle text in the language. Being a writer, this offends me greatly, and so in this article I will teach you to force C to do you bidding and deal with text.Sure, it will kick and scream. But in the end it'll all be worth it, because you can print the glorious text: “Hello World” to your screen.
Just a brief warning: if you've been following along in this series, you may see some information repeated from prior articles. Feel free to skip over it if you like. I've included it here as a reference.
Stringing It All Together
Simply put, a string is a group of characters. An example of a string would be a word: it, the, apple, hamburgers; a sentence: I like to eat bacon; and even random characters thrown together: alpha9fzxc1_beefrt. Strings are stored in memory as ASCII codes, representing the characters. C doesn't know its “G” from a hole in the ground. While you don't need to worry about knowing the various ASCII codes, here is a table of the “printable characters”:
Ascii | Character | Ascii | Character | Ascii | Character |
32 | Space | 64 | @ | 96 | ` |
33 | ! | 65 | A | 97 | a |
34 | “ | 66 | B | 98 | b |
35 | # | 67 | C | 99 | c |
36 | $ | 68 | D | 100 | d |
37 | % | 69 | E | 101 | e |
38 | & | 70 | F | 102 | f |
39 | ' | 71 | G | 103 | g |
40 | ( | 72 | H | 104 | h |
41 | ) | 73 | I | 105 | i |
42 | * | 74 | J | 106 | j |
43 | + | 75 | K | 107 | k |
44 | , | 76 | L | 108 | l |
45 | - | 77 | M | 109 | m |
46 | . | 78 | N | 110 | n |
47 | / | 79 | O | 111 | o |
48 | 0 | 80 | P | 112 | p |
49 | 1 | 81 | Q | 113 | q |
50 | 2 | 82 | R | 114 | r |
51 | 3 | 83 | S | 115 | s |
52 | 4 | 84 | T | 116 | t |
53 | 5 | 85 | U | 117 | u |
54 | 6 | 86 | V | 118 | v |
55 | 7 | 87 | W | 119 | w |
56 | 8 | 88 | X | 120 | x |
57 | 9 | 89 | Y | 121 | y |
58 | : | 90 | Z | 122 | z |
59 | ; | 91 | [ | 123 | { |
60 | < | 92 | | 124 | | |
61 | “=” | 93 | ] | 125 | } |
62 | > | 94 | ^ | 126 | ~ |
63 | ? | 95 | _ |
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Next: Storing Strings >>
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