Sizes of arrays declared with pointers

Question

char c[] = \"Hello\";
char *p = \"Hello\";

printf(\"%i\", sizeof(c)); \\\\Prints 6
printf(\"%i\", sizeof(p)); \\\\Prints 4

My question is:

Why

Answer 1

It sounds like you're confused between pointers and arrays. Pointers and arrays (in this case char * and char []) are not the same thing.

• An array char a[SIZE] says that the value at the location of a is an array of length SIZE
• A pointer char *a; says that the value at the location of a is a pointer to a char. This can be combined with pointer arithmetic to behave like an array (eg, a[10] is 10 entries past wherever a points)

In memory, it looks like this (example taken from the FAQ):

 char a[] = "hello";  // array

   +---+---+---+---+---+---+
a: | h | e | l | l | o |\0 |
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+

 char *p = "world"; // pointer

   +-----+     +---+---+---+---+---+---+
p: |  *======> | w | o | r | l | d |\0 |
   +-----+     +---+---+---+---+---+---+

It's easy to be confused about the difference between pointers and arrays, because in many cases, an array reference "decays" to a pointer to it's first element. This means that in many cases (such as when passed to a function call) arrays become pointers. If you'd like to know more, this section of the C FAQ describes the differences in detail.

One major practical difference is that the compiler knows how long an array is. Using the examples above:

char a[] = "hello";  
char *p =  "world";  

sizeof(a); // 6 - one byte for each character in the string,
           // one for the '\0' terminator
sizeof(p); // whatever the size of the pointer is
           // probably 4 or 8 on most machines (depending on whether it's a 
           // 32 or 64 bit machine)