Why don’t we need for loop to print strings in C?

Question

I don't understand Why don’t we have to print strings in for loop ? In normal cases we need to print arrays in for loop. For example, if we want to print the array of integers. It will be like this:

int a[n];

for (i = 0; i < n; i++){
    printf("%d", a[i]);
}

But for strings like:

char s[100] = " Hello ";
printf("%s\n", s);

it is enough to write the name of array. EDIT: It seems like I didnt ask my question properly as some of you wrote answers which is not related to my question.I edit my question.

Answer 1

Strings terminate with the empty character '\0', that's how it is possible to know when a string ends even without explicitly passing its length.

Answer 2

The difference is that C-style strings (which are char arrays) are zero-terminated, whereas int arrays are normally not zero terminated.

Theoretically, you could also create an int array which is zero-terminated and print that in a loop:

int a[] = {5,7,3,0};

for (i=0;a[i]!=0;i++)
{
   printf("%d",a[i])
}

However, the problem with zero-terminated int arrays is that the number 0 could be a meaningful value, so you cannot be sure that it really is the end of the array when you encounter that value. With strings, however, the ASCII-Code 0 does not represent a meaningful value, so you can be reasonably sure that you have reached the end of the string.

Answer 3

Strings are multiple characters all at once. You cannot ask for a specific character from a string. If you want to do so, you must refer to it as an array of chars like this

for (i = 0; i < n; i++){
     printf("%c", s[i]);
}

Answer 4

It is because you are already providing the parameter which is "%s" to the printf function which already has a definition telling it how to print a string. Hope it helps.

Answer 5

One of the reason is that char only takes 1 byte of memeory and when you just press a character, the first index of array is filled up completely and it moves on to the next one till it encounters NULL character. This is not the case with integer array where the size is more than 1 byte and is machine dependent. So you cannot escape the first index by just pressing the number less than the maximum range. If you try to do this, it will store your numbers in first index only and hence a for loop is required there.