You must become familiar with the pointer concepts covered in the previous articles to use C strings effectively. Once you get used to them, however, you can often perform string manipulations very efficiently. A string in C is simply an array of characters. The following line declares an array that can hold a string of up to 99 characters.
Null termination is very different from the way many other languages handle strings.
For example, in Pascal, each string consists of an array of characters, with a length byte that keeps count of the number of characters stored in the array. This structure gives Pascal a definite advantage when you ask for the length of a string. This fact makes C much slower than Pascal in certain cases, but in others it makes it faster, as we will see in the examples below. Because C provides no explicit support for strings in the language itself, all of the string-handling functions are implemented in libraries. The fact that strings are not native to C forces you to create some fairly roundabout code.