What is the difference between a String and an Array

An array is an array of anything. A string is a specific kind of an array with a well-known convention to determine its length.

There are two kinds of programming languages: those in which a string is just an array of characters and those in which it’s a particular type. In C, a string is just an array of characters (type char), with one wrinkle: a C string always ends with a NULL character.

The “value” of an array is the same as the first element; so, frequently, a C string and a pointer to char are used to mean the same thing. An array can be of any length. If it’s passed to a function, there’s no way the function can tell how long the array is supposed to be unless some convention is used. The convention for strings is NULL termination; the last character is an ASCII NUL (‘’) character.