Question

I am having some difficulty locating information of comparing C strings. I understand that unlike C++, C does not support operator overloading, so I’m wondering if there is any way to check if one string is greater/less than another (e.g. str1 > str2)?

Thanks ahead of time for your responses. This is honestly one of the first times I have actually had to ask a question because I could not find a related post.

Answer 1

There are several, each serving different purposes (omitting wide character variants for now).

strcmp – compares two strings, character by character (with the C notion of what strings are equal or not – that doesn’t need to coincide with how humans think – see strcoll). There’s a variant for comparing only the first at most n characters, strncmp.

strcasecmp – compares two strings, ignoring case. There’s a variant for comparing only the first at most n characters, strncasecmp.

strcoll – compares two strings, observing the currently set locale (which is why it’s called collation, not comparing in this case). If you want ss and ß to compare equal for a German audience, then this is what you should use.

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Where you might write

if (string1 > string2) ...

in a language, you have to write

if (strmp(string1, string2) > 0) ...

in C. Essentially you move both operands into the function call, retain the comparison operator and compare with 0 instead.