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When you delimit a sequence of characters by double-quotation marks, you
are telling C to create an array in which the elements are
the particular characters between the double-quotation marks. The
following, for example, is what C stores on encountering "Food".
0 1 2 3 4 <----- Array index
| | | | |
v v v v v
-------- -------- -------- -------- -------- Memory addresses --*
----*--------*--------*--------*--------*--------*--------*--- |
|01000110|01101111|01101111|01100100|00000000| | |
---*--------*--------*--------*--------*--------*--------*---- |
920 921 922 923 924 925 926 <-----*
-------- -------- -------- -------- --------
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
| | | | *----- End-of-string code
F o o d <----- Encoded character
Note that the four characters in Food are actually stored in a five-element array in which the last element is filled by the null character, usually an all-zero byte, rather than by an actual character's code.
Character arrays terminated by null characters are called character
strings, or, more succinctly, strings. Thus, "Food" is a
notation for a string. Somewhat colloquially, most programmers say that
"Food" is a string.