[c] Does C have a string type?

First, you don't need to do all that. In particular, the strcpy is redundant - you don't need to copy a string just to printf it. Your message can be defined with that string in place.

Second, you've not allowed enough space for that "Hello, World!" string (message needs to be at least 14 characters, allowing the extra one for the null terminator).

On the why, though, it's history. In assembler, there are no strings, only bytes, words etc. Pascal had strings, but there were problems with static typing because of that - string[20] was a different type that string[40]. There were languages even in the early days that avoided this issue, but that caused indirection and dynamic allocation overheads which were much more of an efficiency problem back then.

C simply chose to avoid the overheads and stay very low level. Strings are character arrays. Arrays are very closely related to pointers that point to their first item. When array types "decay" to pointer types, the buffer-size information is lost from the static type, so you don't get the old Pascal string issues.

In C++, there's the std::string class which avoids a lot of these issues - and has the dynamic allocation overheads, but these days we usually don't care about that. And in any case, std::string is a library class - there's C-style character-array handling underneath.

Examples related to c

conflicting types for 'outchar' Can't compile C program on a Mac after upgrade to Mojave Program to find largest and second largest number in array Prime numbers between 1 to 100 in C Programming Language In c, in bool, true == 1 and false == 0? How I can print to stderr in C? Visual Studio Code includePath "error: assignment to expression with array type error" when I assign a struct field (C) Compiling an application for use in highly radioactive environments How can you print multiple variables inside a string using printf?

Examples related to string

How to split a string in two and store it in a field String method cannot be found in a main class method Kotlin - How to correctly concatenate a String Replacing a character from a certain index Remove quotes from String in Python Detect whether a Python string is a number or a letter How does String substring work in Swift How does String.Index work in Swift swift 3.0 Data to String? How to parse JSON string in Typescript

Examples related to char

How can I convert a char to int in Java? C# - How to convert string to char? How to take character input in java Char Comparison in C Convert Char to String in C cannot convert 'std::basic_string<char>' to 'const char*' for argument '1' to 'int system(const char*)' How to get the real and total length of char * (char array)? Why is conversion from string constant to 'char*' valid in C but invalid in C++ char *array and char array[] C++ - How to append a char to char*?

Examples related to printf

How I can print to stderr in C? How can you print multiple variables inside a string using printf? Unsigned values in C How to print multiple variable lines in Java Scanf/Printf double variable C Format specifier %02x %i or %d to print integer in C using printf()? What is the printf format specifier for bool? printf() prints whole array Printf width specifier to maintain precision of floating-point value

Examples related to strcpy

Does C have a string type? error: function returns address of local variable Proper way to empty a C-String How to correctly assign a new string value? Why should you use strncpy instead of strcpy?