Programming in C

268 Chapter 11 Pointers

Initializing the textarray in this manner does not have the effect of storing a pointer to

the character string "This is okay."inside text,but rather the actual characters

themselves inside corresponding elements of the textarray.

If textis a character pointer, initializing textwith the statement

char *text = "This is okay.";

assigns to it a pointer to the character string "This is okay."

As another example of the distinction between character strings and character string

pointers, the following sets up an array called days, which contains pointersto the names

of the days of the week.

char *days[] =

{ "Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday",

"Saturday" };

The array daysis defined to contain seven entries, each a pointer to a character string.

So days[0]contains a pointer to the character string "Sunday",days[1]contains a

pointer to the string "Monday", and so on (see Figure 11.10).You could display the name

of the third weekday, for example, with the following statement:

printf ("%s\n", days[3]);

days[0]

days[1]

days[2]

days[3]

days[4]

days[5]

days[6]

S u n d ay\0

M o n d ay\0

T u e s d ay\0

W e d n e s d ay\0

T h u r s d ay\0

F r i d ay\0

S a t u r d ay\0

Figure 11.10 Array of pointers.

The Increment and Decrement Operators Revisited

Up to this point, whenever you used the increment or decrement operator, it was the

only operator that appeared in the expression.When you write the expression ++x,you

know that this has the effect of adding 1 to the value of the variable x. And as you have