Pointers to Constant Strings
Explore how pointers to constant string literals work in C, including memory representation in the read-only data section, compiler optimizations that share literals, and the importance of marking pointers as const to avoid modification errors and crashes.
We'll cover the following...
String literals
In the previous lesson, we saw that it’s possible to initialize a string as follows:
char str[10] = "abc";
The "abc" value is called a string literal. It is a sequence of characters terminated by the null character ('\0'). They are constant strings that we can’t modify.
Most commonly, they’re placed in the .rodata section of the executable file because they are constant and shouldn’t be modified, only read.
If the same string literal appears multiple times in the code, a smart compiler will only allocate it once inside .rodata and make all references inside the ...