Few questions about C syntax

Question

I have a few questions about C syntax.

1. ch = (char *) malloc( sizeof( char ) * strlen(src) ); What do the first brackets mean (char *) ?

Answer 1

I d like to add to @Alok Save s answer. He has analysed it correctly however, another simple solution exists for that case and that is to use scanf with a whitespace in the string format as follows:

scanf(" %c", &variable);

This is because %c does not absorb the newline character like others(like %d) do. Any whitespace in the format string will cause scan to absorb all consecutive whitespaces thereby obviating the need for another scanf statement.

Hope this helps!