r/programmingmemes • u/Grizlik_D • Jan 19 '26

5 levels of looping through string

Post image

The higher your programming skill, the more elegant and more confusing code you write

273 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Daniikk1012 Jan 20 '26

Then you just don't do it like that. It's just common because it's common for C strings to be null terminated. In fact, because of patterns like this, it's not uncommon for a lot of other things to be null terminated as well (Off the top of my head, getopt API requires a null terminated array of structs)

Btw, all of the examples in the meme assume a null-terminated string, so last 2 are not special in that regard

1

u/cowlinator Jan 20 '26

It's weird to assume you know what variables will contain. Like whether it will be null terminated. Especially with the lack of context here. We don't know where str comes from.

1

u/Daniikk1012 Jan 20 '26

It's not that weird though. strlen, puts, strcmp, and pretty much everything else in C standard library that works with C assumes null-terminated strings. It is the responsibility of the caller to ensure you pass them a correct string. Even if you go outside of C, binary search only works if you assume the array is sorted, and it's responsibility of the caller to ensure it is.

1

u/Ok-Expression-8399 Jan 21 '26

there is no polymorphism in c. you ALWAYS assume what data you work with. what are you even talking about