A Developer's Diary

Mar 31, 2012

Difference between a char [] and char *

There is an important difference between the following two definitions:

char amessage[] = "Hello World"; /* an array */
char *pmessage  = "Hello World"; /* a pointer */

1. amessage is just an array, big enough to hold the sequence of characters and '\0'
2. amessage refers to the same memory location and cannot be changed
3. Individual characters within amessage can be changed
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
    char amessage[] = "Hello World from the C Program";

    amessage[0] = 'P';
    printf("%s\n", amessage);
    return 0;
}

1. pmessage is a pointer pointing to a string constant
2. The string constant "Hello World" is stored in a read only memory location and cannot be modified
3. pmessage can be changed to point to some other memory location
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
    char *pmessage = "Hello World from the C Program";

    pmessage[0] = 'P'; //throws segmentation fault
    printf("%s\n", pmessage);
    return 0;
}

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