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An In-Depth Understanding of Memory and Pointers in C

Challenge: Implement memcmp

Explore how to implement a custom memcmp function that compares two memory blocks byte by byte. Learn to replicate memcmp behavior, handle pointers correctly, and return comparison results based on the first differing byte. This lesson helps solidify your understanding of low-level memory manipulation and function implementation in C.

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The memcmp function

The memcmp function comes from the C standard library. It allows us to compare two memory areas for equality at the byte level.

The header is as follows:

int memcmp(const void* ptr1, const void* ptr2, size_t num);

It compares the first num bytes of ptr1 against the first num bytes of ptr2. It returns the following:

  • < 0 if the blocks are not equal and the first byte that doesn’t match is smaller in ptr1 than ptr2.
  • = 0 if the blocks are
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