Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I know that strcmp returns…
A value greater than zero indicates that the first character that does
not match has a greater value in str1 than in str2; And a value less
than zero indicates the opposite.
But what do those positive or negative numbers mean? for example what does 2 mean?
In short, nothing. It usually depends on how the function is implemented, but you can’t rely on it.
For instance, in the implementation they talk about here (3rd post): http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=24383 it returns the difference between (the numeric representations of) the first differing characters, i.e.
strcmp("ab","ad")would return-2.Alternately, for this implementation, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/Strings#The_strcmp_function the same call would return
-1.