array, strlen in C

[Eraphine Astrid]

if im going to enter some elements into an array, after entering the total number of elements(size of array). And im wandering the following code of (char test [80]), is the elements size it can carry or the maximum array size. Wish someone can explain to me how strlen work and wat does the "n" represent. thank you.

	char test[80];
	char choice;
	int n;

	printf("String to sort>> ");
	gets(test);
	n=strlen(test);

[Codermik]

n is a integer variable which will hold the result returned from the strlen function.

Re: strlen - quote from this website:

The length of a C string is determined by the terminating null-character: A C string is as long as the number of characters between the beginning of the string and the terminating null character (without including the terminating null character itself).

Check here: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstring/strlen/

[Chervil]

The parameter passed to strlen() is a pointer to the start of the array or string. The function simply tests each successive character until it finds a zero. C-strings are represented as an array of characters terminated by a null (zero) byte. Thus the result from strlen is not related to size of the array - if the null terminator is missing, the function will continue to step through memory beyond the end of the array until it finds one.

example:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main()
{
    char array[80] = { 'e', 'x', 'a', 'm', 'p', 'l', 'e', 0 };
    
    printf ("Size of array:    %d\n", sizeof(array));
    printf ("String is:        %s\n", array);
    printf ("length of string: %d\n", strlen(array));

    return 0;
}

output:

Size of array:    80
String is:        example
length of string: 7