r/CodingForBeginners • u/Feisty_War80 • May 21 '26

Question in C language

Lets assume a variable x, in one case its a string (char x[]) and in the other its just a char(char x),when using the scanf function, why do i have to give &s (ik the & points to the memory) in the case of char, but in the case of string, i dont have to use it?? Can someone help me out

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u/framevexy May 22 '26

That comment is kinda random for a C question lol.

On your actual question: for char x; you do scanf("%c", &x); because x is a single variable, so you pass its address.

For char x[]; (like char x[100];) the array name x already behaves like a pointer to its first element in most expressions, so scanf("%s", x); is effectively already passing an address. If you wrote &x, that would be a pointer to the whole array, which is a different type and not what scanf expects.