Since C-style strings are always terminated with the null character (\0), you can check whether the string is empty by writing
do {
...
} while (url[0] != '\0');
Alternatively, you could use the strcmp function, which is overkill but might be easier to read:
do {
...
} while (strcmp(url, ""));
Note that strcmp returns a nonzero value if the strings are different and 0 if they're the same, so this loop continues to loop until the string is empty.
Hope this helps!
Answer from templatetypedef on Stack OverflowSince C-style strings are always terminated with the null character (\0), you can check whether the string is empty by writing
do {
...
} while (url[0] != '\0');
Alternatively, you could use the strcmp function, which is overkill but might be easier to read:
do {
...
} while (strcmp(url, ""));
Note that strcmp returns a nonzero value if the strings are different and 0 if they're the same, so this loop continues to loop until the string is empty.
Hope this helps!
If you want to check if a string is empty:
if (str[0] == '\0')
{
// your code here
}
Videos
When I try using .isEmpty() or isspace() it gives me the message that "expression must have class type" and str != "" doesn't seem to work. The type I'm using is "const char *".
The easy way to do it would be like this:
if (msg[0])
printf("message: %s", msg);
If, at some later date, msg is a pointer, you would first want to assure it's not a NULL pointer.
if (msg && msg[0])
printf("message: %s", msg);
A test program to demonstrate:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
char *msg;
void test() {
if (msg && msg[0])
printf("string is %s\n", msg);
}
int main()
{
msg = NULL;
test();
msg = calloc(10, 1);
test();
msg[0] = 'm';
msg[1] = 'e';
test();
free(msg);
}
On my machine the output is:
string is me
Strings in C are represented as character arrays, terminated by a character whose value is zero (often written as '\0'). The length of a string is the number of characters that come before the zero.
So, a string is empty if the first character in the array is zero, since then by definition no characters came before the zero.
This can be checked like so:
if(msg[0] != '\0')
{
/* string isn't empty! */
}
This is very explicit code, the shorter if(msg[0]) or if(*msg) has the exact same semantics but can be slightly harder to read. It's mostly a matter of personal style.
Note though that in your case, when you use scanf() to read into msg, you should check the return value from scanf() before checking the contents of msg. It's perfectly possible for scanf() to fail, and then you can't rely on msg being set to an empty string.
Im not sure if im correct in calling it an empty string but i thought it would be.
#include "stdio.h"
#include "string.h"
#include "stdlib.h"
int main(void)
{
char input[136];
char partOne[6];
char partTwo[128];
fgets(input, 136, stdin); // Now i input "Hello " or "Hello"
sscanf(input, "%5s %127s", partOne, partTwo);
if(!strcmp(partTwo, ""))
printf("%s\n", "YES");
return 0;
}if I input "Hello " or "Hello" I want to detect that the char array partTwo has an empty string (i don't know what else to call it) but since the check fails then I think its not an empty string so what is it?
If I input "Hello" or "Hello " what is the value of partTwo so I can test for it using strcmp
Thank you!
Perhaps this is trivial, but I got to wondering what is considered the "best" way to check for a blank string. I was specifically thinking of Javascript, although this could be applied to a number of languages. (Any C-style language) I thought up a couple solutions...
if (foo == "") ...
if (foo.length() == 0) ...
Not included in Javascript, but in languages that have it:
if (foo.isEmpty()) ...
Which of these is generally considered the most elegant/readable? Is it the single-purpose function, or a general-purpose function with a comparison? Or does it just not matter?