assigning a string to another string

Question

Why this code is not running? Why str1 is not assigned to str2 ?? I know i have an option of using strcpy but i wish to know the reason why this is not working??

Answer 1

In C you can only assign objects that have type; and in C a string is not a data type. Instead it is a convention - the convention being that strings are represented by null-terminated character arrays; and because arrays are not considered as types, neither are strings.

In your second code fragment, you have simply made q point to s; this is not a copy of the string at s, but merely a copy of the pointer 's'. They both refer to the same data in memory. So if for example you changed the string at 's', and then printed the string at 'q', you will see that the data at 'q' has also changed. More directly if you did printf( "s:%p, q:%p" (void*)s, (void*)q ) ; you will see that they both hold the same pointer value.