The simplest way of printing a portion of a char[] in C

Question

Let\'s say I have a char* str = \"0123456789\" and I want to cut the first and the last three letters and print just the middle, what is the simplest, and safes

Answer 1

If you don't mind modifying the data, you could just do some pointer arithmetic. This is assuming that str is a char pointer and not an array:

char string[] = "0123456789";
char *str = string;

str += 3; // "removes" the first 3 items
str[4] = '\0'; // sets the 5th item to NULL, effectively truncating the string

printf(str); // prints "3456"