Why don't I need to dereference a character pointer in C before printing it?

Question

Why does this code work? I would expect that I would need to dereference ptr, printf(\"%s\\n\", *ptr); before I could print it out, but I get a

Answer 1

*ptr is essentially a reference to a single char, not to the string of char's. due to this char * and char[] are essentially the same thing