What is the difference between char array and char pointer in C?

Question

I am trying to understand pointers in C but I am currently confused with the following:

• char *p = \"hello\"
  

  This is a char pointer

Answer 1

char* and char[] are different types, but it's not immediately apparent in all cases. This is because arrays decay into pointers, meaning that if an expression of type char[] is provided where one of type char* is expected, the compiler automatically converts the array into a pointer to its first element.

Your example function printSomething expects a pointer, so if you try to pass an array to it like this:

char s[10] = "hello";
printSomething(s);

The compiler pretends that you wrote this:

char s[10] = "hello";
printSomething(&s[0]);