What is the default encoding for C strings?

Question

I know that C strings are char[] with a \'\\0\' in the last element. But how are the chars encoded?

Update: I found this cool link which talks about many other prog

Answer 1

They are not really "encoded" as such, they are simply stored as-is. The string "hello" represents an array with the char values 'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o' and '\0', in that order. The C standard has a basic character set that includes these characters, but doesn't specify an encoding into bytes. It could be EBCDIC, for all you know.