How to play with strings in C

We're going to do some amazing thing from this lesson. Let's see how searching works.

Search for a character in a string - strchr & strrchr

The strchr function returns the first occurrence of a character within a string. The strrchr returns the last occurrence of a character within a string. They return a character pointer to the character found, or NULL pointer if the character is not found. Using these functions, let's write a program that output the index of first and last occurrence of all lower case characters in a string.

We define the string to be searched.

char str[] = "finding first and last occurrence of a character is amazing";

We'll loop through all lower case characters. Let's define a character array for that and write a loop.

char alpha[] = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";

for (int i = 0; i < strlen(alpha); i++)
{
}

Both strchr and strrchr returns a pointer to the character where the occurrence of the sought character is found. Say, the string to be searched is "abcd" and the character to be searched for is 'b'. Then a pointer to character 'b' within the string is returned. If the character is not found then NULL is returned.

We declare two character pointers to hold the returned values from the functions. Remember, we search for alpha[i] within str.

char *position_ptr = strchr(str, alpha[i]);
char *r_position_ptr = strrchr(str, alpha[i]);

These character pointers are simply the address of the character found within the array. If we subtract the starting address from this address, then we'll find the index of the character. For example, say we're searching character 'b' in the string "abcd". Say, the string starts at memory address 100. The string "abcd" would look in memory as follows:

 a     b     c     d
100   101   102   103

We see that

Index of 'b' = Address of 'b' - Address of 'a'
             = 101 - 100
             = 1

The starting address of the array can be accessed by the array name. So the index is calculated as follows:

int position = position_ptr - str;
int r_position = r_position_ptr - str;

There is a problem in the code above. The character pointers can be NULL - in case the character is not found in the string. We can define that if a character is not found within the string, then the character's index is -1 (because -1 is an invalid index, we can use it for this purpose). Considering NULL pointer, the positions are redefined as:

int position = (position_ptr == NULL ? -1 : position_ptr - str);
int r_position = (r_position_ptr == NULL ? -1 : r_position_ptr - str);

So we've everything now. We can simply output these positions. Here is a complete example:

Search for string inside another string - strstr

A substring is a contiguous elements of a string. As an example, "ea", "ch" etc are substrings of "teacher"; but "cer" isn't. The function strstr returns the first occurrence of a string in another string. This means that strstr can be used to detect whether a string contains another string. In other words, whether a string is a substring of another string.

strstr returns the first occurrence of the substring in another string in the form of a character pointer pointing to the first character of the match. Consider the following example:

char str[] = "teacher teach tea";
char *ptr = strstr(str, "ac");

ptr will point to the character 'a' of first "ac" in str:

teacher teach tea
  ^
  ptr points here

However, if the string is not found, strstr returns NULL pointer. Using the NULL check, we can verify whether a string contains another string. Here is a complete example:

Search for occurrence of any character in a string - strpbrk

Using strchr one can find if a string contains a single character. What if someone wants to find if a string contains any character from a group of characters? That's what strpbrk does.

You provide two strings to strpbrk. If any character from second string is found in the first string, strpbrk will return a character pointer to the first occurrence. Let's say, you've a string like:

char str[] = "finding digits where there could be digit 5236 is amazing";

You want to know if str contains any digits. So you define a digits array:

char digits[] = "0123456789";

Plug them in to strpbrk:

char *ptr = strpbrk(str, digits);

Because str contains character from digits, ptr will point to its first occurrence:

finding digits where there could be digit 5236 is amazing
                                          ^
                                          ptr points here

ptr will be NULL pointer if no character from second parameter is present in the first parameter. Using NULL check we can verify whether any character from second parameter is present in first parameter. Here is a complete example: