C++ weird output with strings

Question

I tried this in C++ but it prints some garbage: #include using namespace std; int main() { char str[5] = "Hello"; cout << str << endl; return 0; } Why is it not printing “Hello” correctly? How do I fix it?

Answer 1

If you want to work with strings I recomend using the <string> library to avoid such problems

Answer 2

Your code doesn't even compile.

C strings are zero-terminated strings. That is, a zero character ('\0') indicates the end of the string. For this, "Hello" is not 5 characters long, but 6: "Hello\0". Note: '\0' is a single character; the backslash before the 0 is the escape sequence.

char str[6] = "Hello";

would solve your problem.

Or you just do not specify the size, and the compiler will figure it out for you:

char str[] = "Hello";

Or you do not copy the string literal into an array (if you do not have to), but just reference it via its memory address:

const char * str = "Hello";

In the latter case, remember, you do not have a copy of the string literal "Hello". You are pointing to the string literal, and as such, it must not be modified (e.g., by saying str[0] = 'h'; hence the type is const char *). You can still point somewhere else by str though, e.g.: str = "This works too".

Answer 3

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;
int main() {
    char str[6] = "Hello";
    cout << str << endl;
    return 0;
    
}

thats the correct code , Hello has 6 characters including null