[c] Warning: comparison with string literals results in unspecified behaviour

This an old question, but I have had to explain it to someone recently and I thought recording the answer here would be helpful at least in understanding how C works.

String literals like

"a"

or

"This is a string"

are put in the text or data segments of your program.

A string in C is actually a pointer to a char, and the string is understood to be the subsequent chars in memory up until a NUL char is encountered. That is, C doesn't really know about strings.

So if I have

char *s1 = "This is a string";

then s1 is a pointer to the first byte of the string.

Now, if I have

char *s2 = "This is a string";

this is also a pointer to the same first byte of that string in the text or data segment of the program.

But if I have

char *s3 = malloc( 17 );
strcpy(s3, "This is a string");

then s3 is a pointer to another place in memory into which I copy all the bytes of the other strings.

Illustrative examples:

Although, as your compiler rightly points out, you shouldn't do this, the following will evaluate to true:

s1 == s2 // True: we are comparing two pointers that contain the same address

but the following will evaluate to false

s1 == s3 // False: Comparing two pointers that don't hold the same address.

And although it might be tempting to have something like this:

struct Vehicle{
    char *type;
    // other stuff
}

if( type == "Car" )
   //blah1
else if( type == "Motorcycle )
   //blah2

You shouldn't do it because it's not something that is guarantied to work. Even if you know that type will always be set using a string literal.

I have tested it and it works. If I do

A.type = "Car";

then blah1 gets executed and similarly for "Motorcycle". And you'd be able to do things like

if( A.type == B.type )

but this is just terrible. I'm writing about it because I think it's interesting to know why it works, and it helps understand why you shouldn't do it.

Solutions:

In your case, what you want to do is use strcmp(a,b) == 0 to replace a == b

In the case of my example, you should use an enum.

enum type {CAR = 0, MOTORCYCLE = 1}

The preceding thing with string was useful because you could print the type, so you might have an array like this

char *types[] = {"Car", "Motorcycle"};

And now that I think about it, this is error prone since one must be careful to maintain the same order in the types array.

Therefore it might be better to do

char *getTypeString(int type)
{
    switch(type)
    case CAR: return "Car";
    case MOTORCYCLE: return "Motorcycle"
    default: return NULL;
}