GATE Overflow Test Series | Programming | Test 1 | Question: 2

Question

What will be the output of the following C program:

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
  char* my_words[] = {"Abin", "Mahesh", "Seema", "Palak"};
  char *p;
  p = my_words[3];
  printf("%s, ", p+3);
  printf("%c", *p+3);
}

• A. ak, S
• B. , a
• C. Possible Runtime Error
• D. ak, a

Answer 1

Here, p is pointing to the fourth element (array index in C starts from 0) in the array of strings my_words which is "Palak".

p+3, will point to the fourth character in "Palak" which is 'a' and "%s" will print all strings from there till "\0" which is "ak".

(All string literals automatically gets a "\0" at end by the C compiler)

*p+3 -- *p returns 'P' and 'P' + 3 will give the character code of the 3rd character after 'P' which is 'S'. and %c will print the character corresponding to this which is 'S'.

PS: A system can use other character codes than ASCII too but in any character code the values of "a-z" must be in order and so the above answer is not implementation/system defined.