How to check if C string is empty

Question

I\'m writing a very small program in C that needs to check if a certain string is empty. For the sake of this question, I\'ve simplified my code:

#include 

        

Answer 1

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 nonempty.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Typically speaking, you're going to have a hard time getting an empty string here, considering %s ignores white space (spaces, tabs, newlines)... but regardless, scanf() actually returns the number of successful matches...

From the man page:

the number of input items successfully matched and assigned, which can be fewer than provided for, or even zero in the event of an early matching failure.

so if somehow they managed to get by with an empty string (ctrl+z for example) you can just check the return result.

int count = 0;
do {
  ...
  count = scanf("%62s", url);  // You should check return values and limit the 
                               // input length
  ...
} while (count <= 0)

Note you have to check less than because in the example I gave, you'd get back -1, again detailed in the man page:

The value EOF is returned if the end of input is reached before either the first successful conversion or a matching failure occurs. EOF is also returned if a read error occurs, in which case the error indicator for the stream (see ferror(3)) is set, and errno is set indicate the error.

Answer 3

strlen(url)

Returns the length of the string. It counts all characters until a null-byte is found. In your case, check it against 0.

Or just check it manually with:

*url == '\0'

Answer 4

If the first character happens to be '\0', then you have an empty string.

This is what you should do:

do {
    /* 
    *   Resetting first character before getting input.
    */
    url[0] = '\0';

    // code
} while (url[0] != '\0');

Answer 5

You can try like this:-

if (string[0] == '\0') {
}

In your case it can be like:-

do {
   ...
} while (url[0] != '\0')

;

Answer 6

The shortest way to do that would be:

do {
    // Something
} while (*url);

Basically, *url will return the char at the first position in the array; since C strings are null-terminated, if the string is empty, its first position will be the character '\0', whose ASCII value is 0; since C logical statements treat every zero value as false, this loop will keep going while the first position of the string is non-null, that is, while the string is not empty.

Recommended readings if you want to understand this better:

• C strings: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cprogramming/c_strings.htm
• C arrays: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cprogramming/c_arrays.htm
• Relation between arrays and pointers: https://www.programiz.com/c-programming/c-pointers-arrays
• Logical operators: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cprogramming/c_logical_operators.htm