Question

I was asked this on a practice test, that has no answers posted. I have no way to test the code, but it has confused me. Can you please help me out with not only understanding the answer, but why.

int foo() {
    int a = 1;
    char b[] = "zapples";
    a = *(b + 1);
    if (a == 'a') return 1;
    else return 0;
}
What does foo return? ____ 

Answer 1

Have they taught you how C pointers work?

I’m not going to give you a straight answer, but think about this:

b has the starting address of string “zapples”. This means that b[0] points to “z”. Another notation for this is *(b + 0), that is, “the value contained at address b, with an offset of 0). With this information, what is the value of *(b + 1)?

This should be enough to solve the exercise.