strlen C : Counting Strings

Strings in C Programming Language

Strings are essential elements in a programmer’s toolkit. They are one of the most commonly used elementary data types, while writing code, and debugging during the development; as also while formatting output for the user.

In this blog post we are going to see how you can create strings, write them to the output, read user input as strings, and count them. Compared to modern programming languages like Python, or Java, string handling in C is still primitive.

String Operations

Strings in C language are all NULL terminated. NULL is the character ” which is part of the ASCII and extended ASCII sets.

This article is fully concerned with the ASCII base 0-127 values of the 7-bit character set. For internationalization applications, you will need wide-characters, and you will worry about the encoding. But these are not concerns now; we settle with ASCII encoding and basic ISO-Latin/English scripts.

Setting Up Your Environment

If you are a beginning C user, you may benefit from using the C compiler in small steps. In Windows, you can use the Mingw GNU tool chain, Borland C/C++ compilers or Microsoft Visual Studio, or the shell in Linux. Start by typing in the shell,

$ gcc --version

and you should see the following output, then you are ready to dive into C development.

		$ gcc --version 

		gcc (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) 4.6.3 

		Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 

String API in C

To include the string input-output operations in your program, you can add the header file definition:

#include <string.h>

where the strings are known to be NULL terminated character arrays. You can declare a string as follows in the C language

		char roman_emperor_name[] = “Julius Caesar”;

and using the builtin sizeof, and strlen function we can print the memory size of string, and the string length. The ‘strlen’ function defined in the header ‘string.h’ and takes as argument a pointer to a characters array which it reads till the NULL character, and returns the count upto this point, not including this.

Together, our code listing for ‘string_demo0.c’ is the following,

#include<stdio.h> 

#include<string.h> 

#include<stdlib.h>	 

int main() { 

    char roman_emperor_name[] = "Julius Caesar"; 

    printf(" Length of string '%s' = %d\n",roman_emperor_name,strlen(roman_emperor_name)); 

    printf(" number of bytes for storing string '%s' = %d\n",roman_emperor_name,sizeof(roman_emperor_name)); 

    return 0; 

} 

Compiling and running the program you should see the terminal message,

 Length of string 'Julius Caesar' = 13 

 number of bytes for storing string 'Julius Caesar' = 14 

For more details read the manual page on Linux for assert function.

		$ man strlen

should bring up a page like,

STRLEN(3)                  Linux Programmer's Manual                 STRLEN(3) 

NAME 

       strlen - calculate the length of a string 

SYNOPSIS 

       #include <string.h> 

       size_t strlen(const char *s); 

DESCRIPTION 

       The  strlen() function calculates the length of the string s, excluding 

       the terminating null byte (''). 

Related functions

You can also compare strings, copy strings fully or upto n-characters, duplicate strings and use routines to check if characters are alphabetic, numeric, space etc. For details pull up the following manual page by typing, $ man strcpy,

STRCPY(3)                  Linux Programmer's Manual                 STRCPY(3) 

NAME 

       strcpy, strncpy - copy a string 

SYNOPSIS 

       #include <string.h> 

       char *strcpy(char *dest, const char *src); 

       char *strncpy(char *dest, const char *src, size_t n); 

DESCRIPTION 

       The  strcpy()  function  copies the string pointed to by src, including 

       the terminating null byte (''), to the buffer  pointed  to  by  dest.

Creating Runtime Strings – Memory Allocation

To create strings on the run time, say from data received over the Internet, or user input, or files read off the disk, we need to know the number of bytes you want to store on memory. Since this information is not available at runtime, we have to allocate memory and create new space.

In this routine get_new_user_info, we use the function malloc, (for which use the directive #include<stdlib.h>), which retrieves usable memory space from the OS heap memory.

In the following example we request memory for a 500 bytes string which we need at run time. Then we make a local copy of the input string upto 500 bytes, and return a new copy back to the user.

char* make_upto500char_copy( char* old_str ) {

      char* str500byte =  malloc( sizeof(char)*500 ); 

      strncpy( str500byte, old_str, 500 );

      return str500byte;

}

Using some boiler plate main() function to drive this routine, we have a program listing for the code, 'str_demo0.c' as followings.

#include<stdio.h> 

#include<string.h> 

#include<stdlib.h> 

char* make_upto500char_copy( char* old_str ) { 

      char* str500byte =  malloc( sizeof(char)*500 ); 

      strncpy( str500byte, old_str, 500*sizeof(char) ); 

      return str500byte; 

} 

int main() { 

    char *old_str = "Hello, Hello, we are who we are..."; 

    char *new_copy = make_upto500char_copy( old_str ); 

    new_copy[0] = 'J'; //change first letter

    printf("Old = %s\nNew = %s\n",old_str,new_copy); 

    free(new_copy); 

    return 0; 

} 

When you compile the code, and then run program, you will see the following output,

Old = Hello, Hello, we are who we are... 

New = Jello, Hello, we are who we are...

Example – Listing Length Of Input Strings

In this example we read the user input at the console, and print out the statistics of the line number and the line length. Our length includes the ‘\n’ or EOL character, which is why it is 1 more than actual character size in it. We make use of the function getline() in Linux to read the user input stream and output the data.

The program listing, ‘strlen_readip.c’,

#include<stdio.h> 

#include<string.h> 

#include<stdlib.h>	 

int main() { 

    char *input_line = NULL; 

    int line_no = 0, read_count = 0; 

    unsigned int data_length=0; 

    while( getline(&input_line,&read_count,stdin) != - 1 ) { 

        printf( "### %d | L = %d | %s \n >>>",++line_no,strlen(input_line),input_line); 

    } 

    return 0; 

} 

on compiling and giving the following input interactively, gives the output as below

what is your name 

### 1 | L = 18 | what is your name 

 >>>well this is elementary. 

### 2 | L = 25 | well this is elementary. 

 >>>Ok Bye

### 3 | L = 6 | Ok Bye 

^D

Summary

Software developers use strings pervasively in code. Strings are essential elements in a programmer’s toolkit. They are one of the most commonly used elementary data types, while writing code, and debugging during the development; as also while formatting output for the user. You can learn more about algorithms and data structures, when you have mastered the basics of C language.