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Strings in C are represented by arrays of characters. The end of the string is marked with a special character, the null character, which is simply the character with the value 0.

 C's only truly built-in string-handling is that it allows us to use string constants (also called string literals) in our code. Whenever we write a string, enclosed in double quotes, C automatically creates an array of characters for us, containing that string, terminated by the \0 character. For example, we can declare and define an array of characters, and initialize it with a string constant:

char string[ ] = "Hello, world!";