So far, we have stored and used numeric data in our programs. For example, we know how to manipulate integer numbers like 18 or floating-point numbers like 98.6. 
We have also stored individual characters using the char datatype. In this video, we introduce C strings. Strings are the typical way we handle text in our programs.

Suppose we wanted to store the text 'hello'. One thing we could do is to use a char array of five elements, where each element holds one character of the text. 

If we do that, there is no convenient way to print the text. We have to use a loop to print each character separately. 

A more serious problem with this approach can be seen if we want to store different words in our char array at different times. 
Maybe we intend to store words of different lengths, so we decide to make our array have 20 elements instead of 5. 
But now, if we print out all 20 elements, [edit line 12], we end up producing garbage following our 'hello' text. 
The reason is that the rest of the 
array is uninitialized, because we haven't stored values in those elements.

C strings solve these problems. If we use a string, we can print it and manipulate it in other ways without using explicit loops. 
And we won't print garbage that happens to follow our text in memory.

A C string is a character array that has a null character immediately after the final character of text.

So, a string is _not_ a new data type. It is still a char array: a char array with a special null character to mark the end of the text.
This null character is a special character that is never actually displayed as part of a string.  Its purpose is simply to mark the end of strings.  Inside a C program, we write the null character as backslash followed by 0.

As soon as we add the null character, then 'text' is a string and not just an array of chars.

This means that we can use C string facilities on 'text'. We show one example here: using %s as a printf format specifier to print the contents of the string.

We'll learn about other useful things we can do with strings in this set of videos.