c - Finding length of char array

Question

I have some code as follows:

int i=0;
char a[7]={0x00,0xdc,0x01,0x04};
int len=0;
len = sizeof(a);
printf("The Length is : %d", len);

Here I want to find the length of the array a in c? How can this be done?

Answer 1

By convention C strings are 'null-terminated'. That means that there's an extra byte at the end with the value of zero (0x00). Any function that does something with a string (like printf) will consider a string to end when it finds null. This also means that if your string is not null terminated, it will keep going until it finds a null character, which can produce some interesting results!

As the first item in your array is 0x00, it will be considered to be length zero (no characters).

If you defined your string to be:

char a[7]={0xdc,0x01,0x04,0x00};

e.g. null-terminated

then you can use strlen to measure the length of the string stored in the array.

sizeof measures the size of a type. It is not what you want. Also remember that the string in an array may be shorter than the size of the array.