Character arrays and 2D arrays 

 

Strings 

Till now, we have seen how to work with single characters but not with a sequence of 
characters. For storing a character sequence, we use strings. ​Strings are the form of 1D 
character arrays which are terminated by null character. Null character is a special 
character with a symbol '\0’. 

Declaration syntax: 

string variableName; 

string i​ s the datatype in C++ to store continuous characters that terminates on 
encountering a space or a newline. 

For example: 

Suppose the input is: 

Hello! How are you? 

If you try to take input using string datatype over the given example, then it will only store 
Hello! ​in the form of an array. 

To store the full sentence, we would need a total of four-string variables (​though there are 
other methods to handle this (getline), we will soon read about them.​) 

Note: T
​ o use string datatype, don’t forget to include the header file: 

#include <cstring> 

 
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Character arrays 

Declaration syntax: 

char Name_of_array[Size_of_array]; 

All the ways to use them are the same as that of the integer array, just one difference is 
there. In case of an integer array, suppose we want to take 5 elements as input, an array of 
size 5 will be good for this. 

In case of character arrays, if the length of the input is 5 then we would have to create an 
array of size at least 6, meaning c
​ haracter arrays require one extra space in the 
memory from the given size. ​This is because the character arrays store a NULL character 
at the last of the given input size as the mark of termination in the memory. 

Now talking about the memory consumption, as each character requires 4 bytes in 
memory, the character array will require 4 multiplied by the character array size. 

Also to take the character array as the input, you don’t need to necessarily run the loop for 
each element. You can directly do the same as follows: 

cin >> Name_of_array;  

If we take above the example and run this statement over that and let the name of the 
array is arr and the size of array is at least 7, then the memory representation is as follows: 

0 1 2 3 4 5 6   

‘H’  ‘e’  ‘l’  ‘l’  ‘o’  ‘!’  ‘\0’                           

Here, also the cin statement terminates taking input if it encounters any of the following: 

● Space 
● Tab 
● \n 

At the last you can notice some special character is placed, that is the NULL character about 
which we were talking earlier.  

 
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In the same way, you can directly use a cout statement to print the character array instead 
of running the loop.  

Till now we haven’t solved ​the "string with spaces" problem​. Let’s check that also… 

Getline function: 

In C++, we have another function named as ​cin.getline() ​ which takes 3 arguments: 

● Name of the string or character array name 

● Length of the string 
● Delimiter (optional argument) 

Syntax: 

cin.getline(string_name, length_of_string, delimiter); 

Note:​ This function breaks at new line. This also initializes the last position to NULL. 

Delimiter denotes the ending of each string. Generally, it is ‘\n’ by default.  

Let’s look at some examples: 

Suppose the input we want to take is: H

​ ello how are you? 

If the input commands are: 

● cin.getline(input, 100);​: this will input all the characters of input 

● cin.getline(input, 3);​: this will input only the first 3 characters of input and discard 
the rest instead of showing error. 

In-built functions for character array: 

● strlen(string_name)​: To calculate the length of the string 

● strcmp(string1, string2)​: Comparison of two strings returns an integer value. If it 
returns 0 means equal strings. If it returns a positive value, it means that string2 is 
greater than string1 and if it returns a negative value, it means that string1 is greater 
than string2.  

 
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● strcpy(destination_string, source_string) : ​It copies the source_string to 

destination_string. 
● strncpy(destination_string, source_string, number_of_characters_to_copy): ​it 
copies only a specified number of characters from source_string to 
destination_string. 

2D arrays 

Combination of many 1D arrays forms a 2D array. 

Syntax to declare a 2D array: 

datatype array_name[rows][columns]; 

where rows imply the number of rows needed for the array and column implies the 
number of columns needed. 

For example: I​ f we want to declare an integer array of size 2x3, then: 

int arr[2][3]; 

It looks like: 

   

   

   

In this array you can store the values as required. Suppose in the above array you want to 
store 3 at every index, you can do so using the following code: 

for (int i = 0; i < 2; i++) 

{ 
for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++) 
{ 
arr[i][j] = 3; 
} 
} 

 
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where, arr[i][j] invokes the element of the ith row and jth column. 

How are 2D arrays stored in the memory? 

They are actually stored as a 1D array of size (number_of_rows * number_of_columns). 

Like if you have an array of size 5 x 5, so in the memory, a 1D array is created of size 25 and 
if you want to get the value of the element (2,1) in this array, it will invoke (2*5 + 1 = 11)th 
position in the array. We don’t need to take care of this calculation, these are done by the 
compiler itself. 

If we want to pass this array to a function, we can simply pass the name of the array as we 
did in the case of 1D arrays. But in the function definition, we can leave the first dimension 
empty, though the second dimension always needs to be specified. 

Syntax for function call: 

int fun (int arr[ ][number_of_columns], int n, int m) { 

…………….. 
} 

  

Let’s move to some questions now: 

Practice problems: 

Arrays and strings: 

https://www.hackerearth.com/challenges/competitive/code-monk-array-str
ings/problems/ 

2D arrays: 

https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/2d-array/problem 
https://www.techgig.com/practice/data-structure/two-dimensional-arrays 

 
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Rest there are many questions available for practice on codezen too. You can try them 
also... 

 
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