C Programming Assignment Help on Strings

Unlike the vast majority of programming languages, C has no string type instead it has an array of characters and ends when a 0 character is reached. You can use “” to define a string which is an array and that ends with a 0 character, but to do any operations on a string you need to use one of the predefined library functions. C strings also 8 bit characters so they can only encode ascii, although utf-8 is designed so that unicode strings can be used without encountering any 0 byte value which would end the string.

The header file “string.h” should be included it you want to use the library string functions, and you are responsible for allocating and freeing memory used for strings, so you will also need “stdlib.h” for the malloc and free functions.

Most of the string functions are easy to program yourself, but the library functions may use assembly language to perform better than code you can write yourself. The function strlen returns the length of the string (excluding the trailing 0). The function strcpy copies the string from one location to another (and it copies the trailing 0 as well). To join two strings together you use the strcat function, it modifies the first string by copying the second string over the 0 character. To compare two strings, you use strcmp which returns 0 if the strings are identical or a positive number if the first string is greater, or a negative number if it is lesser.

To read or write a string you use gets or puts, or you can use fputs and fgets to read or write from a file. You may also need to convert a number to a string or a string to a number. The atoi function converts a string to an integer value, and atof is used to convert to a floating point value, the itoa converts the integer back into a string and it also takes the base of the number, and the ftoa function is used to convert a floating point value.

C++ uses templates and operator overloading to provide a string class that acts much more like a built in string type. If you need help using strings in C we can program the assignment using the library methods or providing alternatives where no library function exists. One of the problems you may have dealing with strings is remembering to free them, we can provide a library that will act a string repository that will provide strings to you and will automatically free them, and will allocate the required amount of space when you create new strings. So if you have a homework involving C and strings and are stuck without a clue, let us provide you with solution. Strings are important even if you are just dealing with numeric values since they are required to input and output the values to a file, so you will need to understand them in order to work in C.

You can rely on Programming Homework Helper to provide any C programming homework help you may have.