Question

In C, you have to declare the length of an array:

int myArray[100];

But when you’re dealing with chars and strings, the length can be left blank:

char myString[] = "Hello, World!";

Does the compiler generate the length for you by looking at the string?

Answer 1

This is not unique to char. You could do this, for instance:

int myNumbers[] = { 5, 10, 15, 20, 42 };

This is equivalent to writing:

int myNumbers[5] = { 5, 10, 15, 20, 42 };

Initialising a char array from a string literal is a special case.