Question

This might sound a bit dumb but am confused.
I know the strlen() would return the size of the character array in c. But there is something different going on with pointers to character.
This is my code:

void xyz(char *number)
{
    int i = 0;
    int length = strlen(number) - 2;
    while(i <= length)
    {
        printf("Number[]: %c",number[i]);
        i++;
    }
}

This prints the entire number I enter (Eg: 12345) but if I remove the -2 the result is not the same.
Could anyone tell me what am I missing?

Answer 1

There’s a good chance that you’re doing this to a string that you have obtained with fgets or a similar input function. In that case, it may well have the newline at the end still.

If you change your code temporarily to:

void xyz (char *number) {
    int i = 0, length = strlen (number);
    while (i < length)
        printf ("Number[%d]: %c (%d)", i, number[i], number[i]);
        i++;
    }
}

that should also show the numeric codes for all characters.

The problem with encoding something like that - 2 in your function is that it will not work with:

xyz ("123");

since it will stop early, printing out only 12. The caller should be calling with valid data, meaning that it should adjust the value to be a numeric string before calling.

---

You can see this happening in the following program:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

void xyz (char *number) {
    int i = 0, length = strlen(number) - 2;
    while(i <= length)
    {
        printf("Number[%d]: %c (%d)\n",i, number[i], number[i]);
        i++;
    }
    puts ("===");
}

void xyz2 (char *number) {
    int i = 0, length = strlen(number);
    while(i < length)
    {
        printf("Number[%d]: %c (%d)\n",i, number[i], number[i]);
        i++;
    }
    puts ("===");
}

int main (void) {
    char buff[100];
    printf ("Enter number: ");
    fgets (buff, sizeof (buff), stdin);
    xyz (buff);
    xyz ("12345");
    xyz2 (buff);
    xyz2 ("12345");
    return 0;
}

The (annoted) output of this, if you enter 98765, is:

Enter number: 98765
Number[0]: 9 (57)
Number[1]: 8 (56)
Number[2]: 7 (55)  # Your adjustment works here because of the newline.
Number[3]: 6 (54)
Number[4]: 5 (53)
===
Number[0]: 1 (49)
Number[1]: 2 (50)
Number[2]: 3 (51)  # But not here, since it skips last character.
Number[3]: 4 (52)
===
Number[0]: 9 (57)
Number[1]: 8 (56)
Number[2]: 7 (55)  # Here you can see the newline (code 10).
Number[3]: 6 (54)
Number[4]: 5 (53)
Number[5]:
 (10)
===
Number[0]: 1 (49)
Number[1]: 2 (50)
Number[2]: 3 (51)  # And proper numeric strings work okay.
Number[3]: 4 (52)
Number[4]: 5 (53)
===

---

If you’re looking for a robust user input function that gets around this problem (and avoids dangerous things like unbounded scanf("%s") and gets), I have one elsewhere on SO (right HERE, in fact) drawn from my arsenal.