Question

I have the following code:

    int i=1;
    printf((i==1)?" ":"   " "hello");
    printf(" " "hello");

And I am astonished to see that the first printf only gives a space as output and the second printf outputs a space followed by the string hello. I was expecting output like second one in case of first one. But is there something here I am missing. Please help me with this …

Answer 1

String literal joining is a lexical feature, which means this:

(i==1) ? " " : "   " "hello"

is the same as this:

(i==1) ? " " : "   hello"

It should now be pretty obvious why you get the result you get.