What does while(*pointer) means in C?

Question

When I recently look at some passage about C pointers, I found something interesting. What it said is, a code like this:

char var[10];
char *pointer = &v         


        

Answer 1

*pointer means exactly what it says: "Give me the value that's stored at the place that the pointer points to". Or "dereference pointer" for short. In your concrete example, dereferencing the pointer produces the one of the characters in a string.

while(*pointer) also means exactly what is says: "While the expression *pointer yields a true value, execute the body of the loop".

Since C considers all non-zero values as true, using *pointer in a condition is always equivalent to using the expression *pointer != 0. Consequently, many C programmers omit the != 0 part in order to practice boolean zen.