The following statement doesn't work in Java, but works in C: char c[] = "abcdefghijklmn"; What's wrong? Does the char array can only be initialized as following? char c[] = {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd'... More on stackoverflow.com

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In C, strings are defined using char * or using a char array: char *name = “Zara Ali”; or char name[] = “Zara Ali”; In other words, a string is an array of characters. Your ‘names’ variable, however, is an array of strings. This means that ‘names’ is an array of an array of characters. You can define arrays using square bracket notation or with a *. So ‘char *names[]’ is a pointer to an array of chars. If you remove the * then C expects an array of characters and not an array of strings (an array of an array of characters). More on reddit.com

Am I correct in that the above fails because I'm telling it to put "Mary" in the name[20] element? Technically correct. name[20] is actually out of bounds due to 0-based indexing, so it would be the 21st element in a 20 element array. Either way, you're trying to assign a char* to a char. Is there a way to initialize char name[20] array separately from the declaration without using srtcpy()? Not with a literal. You have to manually copy the bytes. The string literal initialization is a unique exception granted by the standard to char[] objects; normally a string literal is converted to a pointer, but when it appears as an initializer for a char[] it gets copied into the array. More on reddit.com