What is the type of string literals in C and C++?

Question

What is the type of string literal in C? Is it char * or const char * or const char * const?

What about C++?

Answer 1

A C string literal has type char [n] where n equals number of characters + 1 to account for the implicit zero at the end of the string.

The array will be statically allocated; it is not const, but modifying it is undefined behaviour.

If it had pointer type char * or incomplete type char [], sizeof could not work as expected.

Making string literals const is a C++ idiom and not part of any C standard.