Where are literal strings placed and why can I return pointers to them?

Question

I stumbled upon this function in an answer to this question:

/* Note: I\'ve formatted the code for readability. */
const char * getString() {
    const char *x =         


        

Answer 1

In C, string literals have static storage duration. Your code is logically equivalent to:

const char * getString() {
    static const char literal[] = "abcstring";
    const char *x = literal;
    return x;
}

with the exception that in the version with the string literal, the storage for the string could overlap with the storage of other string literals.