Question

suppose i have in my code written following :-

char *abc = " Who cares";
int len= strlen(abc);

This provides me the length of abc . My Doubt is how does Strlen determines the length of
abc here . Certainly it looks for null termination and returns the value . But that does that mean that abc is assigned Null at the place where i am initializing it with value ” Who cares ” ?

Answer 1

Yes, strlen walks through the memory pointed to by abc until it finds a null termination character.

abc is not initialized with null. The compiler places the string somewhere in memory (including an implicit null termination character); abc is then initialized with the address of the first character in the string.

So:

 0x1234                        0x123E  (example addresses)
+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
|  |W |h |o |  |c |a |r |e |s |\0|
+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
 ^
 |
 |
abc = 0x1234