Question

I have a real struggle when it comes to working with strings, whether they're arrays or pointers to strings, and I'm lost cause when I read or watch tutos I understand them, but then I'm like a novice when I need to write actual code, what should I do?

PS: I'm using C language.

Answer 1

In C, you deal with a string always via a pointer. The pointer by itself will not allocate memory for you, so you'll have to take care of that.

When you write char* s = "Hello world"; s will point to a "Hello world" buffer compiled into your code, called a string literal.

If you want to make a copy of that string, you'll have to provide a buffer, either through a char array or a malloc'ed bit of memory:

char myCopy[100];
strcpy(myCopy, s);

or

char *myCopy;
myCopy = (char*)malloc( strlen(s) + 1 );
strcpy(myCopy, s);

The malloc'ed memory will have to be returned to the runtime at some point, otherwise you have a memory leak. The char array will live on the stack, and will be automatically discarded.

Not sure what else to write here to help you...