Escape sequence in C in string - c

In this code:
int main()
{
char str[]= "geeks\nforgeeks";
char *ptr1, *ptr2;
ptr1 = &str[3];
ptr2 = str + 5;
printf("%c", ++*str - --*ptr1 + *ptr2 + 2);
printf("%s", str);
getchar();
return 0;
}
Why does the compiler interpret \n as an escape sequence and not as two characters viz, \ and n?
On the other hand, this program does not comment out hello.
int main()
{
char str[]= "geeks/*hello*/geeks";
printf ("%s",str);
return 0;
}

Why does the compiler interpret \n as an escape sequence and not as
two characters viz, \ and n?
By the definition of the escape sequence.
The C Standard (5.2.2 Character display semantics)
2 Alphabetic escape sequences representing nongraphic characters in
the execution character set are intended to produce actions on display
devices as follows:
//...
\n (new line) Moves the active position to the initial position
of the next line.
If you want to have two separate characters \ and n then you should write for example
char str[]= "geeks\\nforgeeks";
Now there are two separate characters one of which is represented by the escape sequence '\\' and other by the symbol 'n'.
As for the second your question
On the other hand, this program does not comment out hello.
char str[]= "geeks/*hello*/geeks";
Then within a string literal symbols /* and */ do not form a comment. They are elements of the string literal.
The C Standard (6.4.9 Comments)
1 Except within a character constant, a string literal, or a
comment, the characters /* introduce a comment. The contents of such a
comment are examined only to identify multibyte characters and to find
the characters */ that terminate it.

But that is inside a string, so how does the compiler know?
The below quotes and links are sufficient enough to understand what is an escape sequence.
From Wikipedia
In C, all escape sequences consist of two or more characters, the first of which is the backslash, \ (called the "Escape character");
Also from C11 Standard
In a character constant or string literal, members of the execution character set shall be represented by corresponding members of the source character set or by escape sequences consisting of the backslash \ followed by one or more characters. A byte with all bits set to 0, called the null character, shall exist in the basic execution character set; it is used to terminate a character string.

Related

Why does C not recognize strings across multiple lines?

(I am very new to C.)
Visual newlines seem to be unimportant in C.
For instance:
int i; int j;
is same as
int i;
int j;
and
int k = 0 ;
is same as
int
k
=
0
;
so why is
"hello
hello"
not the same as
"hello hello"
It is because a line that contains a starting quote character and not an ending quote character was more likely a typing mistake or other error than an attempt to write a string across multiple lines, so the decision was made that string literals would not span source lines, unless deliberately indicated with \ at the end of a line.
Further, when such an error occurs, the compile would be faced with reading possibly thousands of lines of code before determining there was no closing quote character (end of file was reached) or finding what was intended as an opening quote character for some other string literal and then attempting to parse the contents of that string literal as C code. In addition to burdening early compilers with limited compute resources, this could result in confusing error messages in a part of the source code far removed from the missing quote character.
This choice is effected in C 2018 6.4.5 1, which says that a string literal is " s-char-sequenceopt ", where s-char-sequence is any member of the character set except the quote character, a backslash, or a new-line character (and a string literal may also have an encoding prefix, a u8, u, U, or L before the first ").
Strings can be continued over newlines by putting a backslash immediately before the newline:
"hello \
hello"
Or (better), using string concatenation:
"hello "
"hello"
Note that the space has been carefully preserved so that these are equivalent to "hello hello" except for the line numbering in the file after the appearance.
The backslash-newline line elimination is done very early in the translation process — in phase 2 of the conceptual translation phases.
Note that there is no stripping leading blanks or anything. If you write:
printf("Some long string with maybe an integer %d in it\
and some more data on the next line\n", i);
Then the string has a sequence of (at least) 8 blanks in it between in it and and some. The count of 8 assumes that the printf() statement is aligned in the left margin; if it is indented, you'd need to add the extra white space corresponding to the indentation.
1- using double quotes for each string :
char *str = "hello "
"hello" ;
** One problem with this approach is that we need to escape specially characters such as quotation mark " itself.
2- Using - \ :
char *str = "hello \
hello" ;
** This form is a lot easier to write, we don't need to write quotation marks for each line.
We can think of a C program as a series of tokens: groups of characters that can't be split up without changing their meaning. Identifiers and keywords are tokens. So are operators like + and -, punctuation marks such as the comma
and semicolon, and string literals.
For example, the line
int i; int j;
consists of 6 tokens: int, i, ;, int, j and ;. Most of the time, and particularly in this case, the amount of space (space, tab and newline characters) is not critical. That's why the compiler will treat
int i
;int
j;
The same.
Writing
"Hello
Hello"
Is like writing
un signed
and hope that the compiler treat it as
unsigned
Just like space is not allowed between a keyword, newline character is not allowed in a string literal token. But it can be included using the newline escape '\n' when needed.
To write strings across lines use string concatenation method
"Hello"
"Hello"
Although the above method is recommended, you can also use a backslash
"Hello \
Hello"
With the backslash method, beware of the beginning space in a new line. The string will include everything in that line until it finds a closing quote or another backslash.

Handling Backslash Escape Sequences in C

I was looking at an example in my course slides, which didn't come with much explanation.
char getchar_escaped(void)
{
char c;
if ((c = getchar()) != '\\') return c;
switch ((c = getchar())) {
case '\\':
return '\\';
case 'n':
return '\n';
default:
return c;
}
}
What exactly is happening in this code? How is this dealing with newlines and double slashes?
In C character string literals and single-character constants, there are a number of 'special' characters that cannot be readily represented in source code text. Examples are the newline character, the nul (terminator) character and the carriage-return.
The language allows us coders to include such characters by using escape sequences - which are entered using the backslash character (\) followed by a suitably-descriptive 'ordinary' character. So, we can specify the newline character using an 'escaped' "n", like this: char NewLine = '\n'; similarly, the nul and carriage-return characters are represented by \0 and \r, respectively.
However, this convention causes a problem when we actually want to specify the backslash character itself! So, in order to do so, we specify an escape sequence where the second character is also a backslash; thus, the code char BackSlash = '\\'; assigns to BackSlash the value (probably ASCII, but not necessarily so) of the backslash itself.
In your code, the test after the first c = getchar() checks for an input backslash character - which, if found, signals the start of one of these "escape sequences" - if it isn't found, we can simply return the actual character input. However, if we thus detect the start of an escape sequence, we need to check the next character: if this is an "n" (case 'n':) we return the escape sequence representing newline character (return '\n';); if it is another backslash (case '\\':) we return the sequence for the actual backslash (return '\';).
Other standard escape sequences aren't detected in your code, but it would be trivial to add further checks for these.
Please feel free to ask for further clarification and/or explanation.
\ has special meaning. It usually alter the meaning of the next character. Example: \n means new line, which is actually an ASCII character. But since \ mean "alter the next character" than how you could have the literal \ character? By altering it with \ by doing \\. This mean "take the literal \ character".
char getchar_escaped(void)
{
char c;
// read a char from the input if it is the '\' character than return with it
if ((c = getchar()) != '\\') return c;
switch ((c = getchar())) { // read in another character
case '\\': return '\\'; // if it a '\' character then return '\'
case 'n': return '\n'; // if it an 'n' than return the new line character: '\n'
default: // otherwise
return c; // just return the character that was read
}
}
There are two distinct uses of backslash escape sequences in the code you posted.
C uses backslash escape sequences as part of the grammar of the C language to represent certain character values in a character constant or a string literal. In a character constant or string literal, the sequence \\ represents a single backslash character, and the sequence \n represents a single newline character. There are several more of these backslash escape sequences in the C language. Consult a C reference for details.
The program's getchar_escaped function is reading characters from standard input and applying its own backslash escape rules that happen to match those of the C language itself as far as the sequences \\ and \n are concerned. If it is not currently reading a backslash escape sequence and it reads a backslash character, it reads the next character and returns a character corresponding to the backslash sequence (e.g. returning a newline character if the character following the backslash is n). (In fact, n is the only character that it doesn't map to an identical character. The special case for handling a backslash followed by a backslash is redundant.)

Null character and strings in C

I have the following C code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <strings.h>
int main(void){
char * str = "\012\0345";
char testArr[8] = {'\0','1','2','\0','3','4','5','\0'};
printf("%s\n",str);
printf("**%s**",testArr);
return 0;
}
See live code here
I'm having trouble understanding the results and I have googled but am unsure that I understand why a null character at the start of a string and why one in the middle would cause only the string "5" to display. Also, when I assign each string character to array testArr and then attempt to display that array of characters the result is different despite the string and the array having the same characters. So, I'm struck by the confounding results, especially their disparity. With the string str, does the code display "5" because the null characters overwrite what is in memory?
Also, with the array I created using the same characters, nothing displays of the data contained in array testArr. Is it that once the first null is encountered for some reason everything else is ignored? If so, why doesn't the same behavior occur with string str which contains the same characters?
An octal escape sequence is \ followed by one to three octal digits, per C 2018 6.4.4.4 1. Per 6.4.4.4 7: “Each octal or hexadecimal escape sequence is the longest sequence of characters that can constitute the escape sequence.” So, when the compiler sees "\012\0345", it interprets it as the sequence \012 (which is ten), the sequence \034 (which is twenty-eight), and the character 5.
To represent the string you intended, you could use "\00012\000345". Since an octal escape sequence stops at three digits, this is interpreted as the sequence \000, the characters 1 and 2, the sequence \000, and the characters 3, 4, and 5. (A null terminating character will also be appended automatically.)
When you printed "\012\0345", the characters with codes ten and twenty-eight were printed but had no visible effect. (Your C implementation likely uses ASCII, in which case they are control characters. \012 is new-line, so it should have caused a line advance, but you probably did not notice that. \034 is a file-separator control character, which likely has no effect when printed to a regular terminal display.)
When you printed testArr, the null character in the first position ended the string.

sizeof(string) not including a "\" sign

I've been going through strlen and sizeof for strings (char arrays) and I don't quite get one thing.
I have the following code:
int main() {
char str[]="gdb\0eahr";
printf("sizeof=%u\n",sizeof(str));
printf("strlen=%u\n",strlen(str));
return 0;
}
the output of the code is:
sizeof=9
strlen=3
At first I was pretty sure that 2 separate characters \ followed by 0 wouldn't actually act as a NUL (\0) but I managed to figure that it does.
The thing is that I have no idea why sizeof shows 9 and not 10.
Since sizeof counts the amount of used bytes by the data type why doesn't it count the byte for the \?
In a following example:
char str[]="abc";
printf("sizeof=%u\n",sizeof(str));
that would print out "4" because of the NUL value terminating the array so why is \ being not counted?
In a character or string constant, the \ character marks the beginning of an escape sequence, used to represent character values for which there isn't a symbol in the source character set. For example, the escape sequence \n represents the newline character, \b represents the backspace character, \0 represents the zero-valued character (which is also the string terminator), etc.
In the string literal "gdb\0eahr", the escape sequence \0 maps to a single 0-valued character; the actual contents of str are {'g', 'd', 'b', 0, 'e', 'a', 'h', 'r', 0}.
It seems you already have the answer:
At first I was pretty sure that 2 separate characters "\" followed by "0" wouldn't actually act as a NULL "\0" but I managed to figure that it does.
The sequence \0 is an octal escape sequence for the byte 0. So while there are two characters in the code to denote this, it translated to a single byte in the string.
So you have 7 alphabetic characters, a null byte in the middle, and a null byte at the end. That's 9 bytes.
Why should char str[]="gdb\0eahr"; be 10 bytes with sizeof operator? It is 9 bytes because there are 8 string elements + trailing zero.
\0 is only 1 character, not 2. \'s purpose is to escape characters, therefore you might see some of these: \t, \n, \\ and others.
Strlen returns 3 because you have string termination at position str[3].
Single sequence of \ acts as escape character and is not part of string size. If you want to literally use \ in your string, you have to write it twice in sequence like \\, then this is single char of \ printable char.
The C compiler scans text strings as a part of compiling the source code and during the scan any special, escape sequences of characters are turned into a single character. The symbol backslash (\) is used to indicate the start of an escape sequence.
There are several formats for escape sequences. The most basic is a backslash followed by one of several special letters. These two characters are then translated into a single character. Some of these are:
'\n' is turned into a line feed character (0x0A or decimal 10)
'\t' is turned into a tab character (0x09 or decimal 9)
'\r' is turned into a carriage return character (0x0D or decimal 13)
'\\' is turned into a backslash character (0x5C)
This escape sequence idea was used back in the old days so that when a line of text was printed to a teletype machine or printer or a CRT terminal, the programmer could use these and other special command code characters to set where the next character would be printed or to cause the device to do some physical action like ring a bell or feed the paper to the next line.
The escape character also allowed you to embed a double quote (") or a single quote (') into a text string so that you could print text that contain quote marks.
In addition to the above special sequences of backslash followed by a letter there was also a way to specify any character by using a backslash followed by one up to three octal digits (0 through 7). So you could specify a line feed character by either using '\n' or you could use '\12' where 12 is the octal representation of the hexadecimal value A or the decimal value 10.
Then the ability to use a hexadecimal escape sequence was introduced with the backslash followed by the letter x followed by one or more hexadecimal digits. So you can write a line feed character with '\n' or '\12' or '\xa'.
See also Escape sequences in C in Wikipedia.

Confused about C string constants

When I came across this C language implementation of Porters Stemming algorithm I found a C-ism I was confused about.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
void test( char *s )
{
int len = s[0];
printf("len= %i\n", len );
printf("s[len] = %c\n", s[len] );
}
int main()
{
test("\07" "abcdefg");
return 0;
}
and output:
len = 7
s[len] = g
However, when I input
test("\08" "abcdefgh");
or any string constant that is longer than 7 with the corresponding length in the first pair of parenthesis ( i.e. test("\09" "abcdefghi"); the output is
len = 0
s[len] =
But any input like test("\01" "abcdefgh"); prints out the character in that position ( if we call the first character position 1 and not 0 for the moment )
It appears if test( char *s ) reads the number in the first pair of parenthesis ( how it does this I am not sure since I thought s[0] would be able to only read a single char, i.e. the '\' ) and prints the last character at that index + 1 of the string constant in the second pair of parenthesis.
My question is this: It seems as if we are passing two string constants into test( char *s ). What exactly is happening here, meaning, how does the compiler seem to "split" up the string over two pairs of parenthesis? Another question one might have is, is a string of the form "blah" "abcdefg" one consecutive block of memory? It may be the case that I have overlooked something elementary, but even so I would like to know what I overlooked. I know this is a basic concept but I could not find a clear example or situation on the web that explains this and in all honesty I don't follow the output. Any helpful comments are welcomed.
There are at least three things going on here:
Literal strings juxtaposed against one another are concatenated by the compiler. "a" "b" is exactly the same as "ab".
The backslash is an escape character, which means it is not copied literally into the resulting string. The notation \01 means "the character with ASCII value 1".
The notation \0... means an octal character constant. Octal numbers are base 8, made up from digits that range from 0 through 7 inclusive. 8 is not a valid octal constant, so "\08" does not follow "\07".
The problem is not in the length of the string, but in the \o syntax for specifying non-printable values in string literals. \o, \oo, and \ooo denote octal constants, i.e. a single character whose value is written in base 8. Since 08 in \08 doesn't represent a valid base 8 number, it is interpreted as \0 followed by the ASCII character 8.
To fix the problem, represent 8 as \10 or \010:
test("\007" "abcdefg");
test("\010" "abcdefgh");
...or switch to hexadecimal, where the \x prefix makes the base more explicit to the casual reader:
test("\x07" "abcdefg");
test("\x08" "abcdefgh");
test("\x09" "abcdefghi");
test("\x0a" "abcdefghij");
...
\number in a character or string literal is means the character whose code is the value number. number is interpreted in octal, so the first non-octal digit terminates the number. So "\07" is a one-character string containing the character with code 7, but \08 is a two-character string containing the character with code 0 followed by the digit 8.
Additionally, code 0 the null terminator that's used in C to indicate the end of the string. So that second string ends at the beginning, because its first byte is the terminator. This why the length of the string in your second example is 0.
When two or more string literals are adjacent (separated only by white-space), the compiler will join them into a single string. Therefore "\07" "abcdefg" is equivalent to "\07abcdefg".
"\07" is an octal escape. An octal escape ends after three digits or with first non-octal character. So, when you enter "\08", 8 is a non octal character therefore escape ends and 0 is stored at s[0].
Now, len is 0 and printing s[len] will try to print the character at s[0] which has a non printable ASCII code (Only character above ASCII value above 32 are printable).

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