Proper way to initialize a string in C

Question

I\'ve seen people\'s code as:

char *str = NULL;

and I\'ve seen this is as well,

char *str;

I\'m wonder, what

Answer 1

I'm wonder, what is the proper way of initializing a string?

Well, since the second snippet defines an uninitialized pointer to string, I'd say the first one. :)

In general, if you want to play it safe, it's good to initialize to NULL all pointers; in this way, it's easy to spot problems derived from uninitialized pointers, since dereferencing a NULL pointer will yield a crash (actually, as far as the standard is concerned, it's undefined behavior, but on every machine I've seen it's a crash).

However, you should not confuse a NULL pointer to string with an empty string: a NULL pointer to string means that that pointer points to nothing, while an empty string is a "real", zero-length string (i.e. it contains just a NUL character).

char * str=NULL; /* NULL pointer to string - there's no string, just a pointer */
const char * str2 = ""; /* Pointer to a constant empty string */

char str3[] = "random text to reach 15 characters ;)"; /* String allocated (presumably on the stack) that contains some text */
*str3 = 0; /* str3 is emptied by putting a NUL in first position */