C programming/string.h/strcmp

In POSIX and in the programming language C, strcmp is a function in the C standard library (declared in string.h) that compares two C strings. The prototype according ISO/IEC 9899:1999, 7.21.4.2 int strcmp(const char *s1, const char *s2); strcmp returns 0 when the strings are equal, a negative integer when s1 is less than s2, or a positive integer if s1 is greater than s2, according to the lexicographical order. A variant of strcmp exists called strncmp that only compares the strings up to a certain offset. Another variant, strcasecmp, conforming to POSIX.1-2001, works like strcmp, but is case-insensitive. Some systems instead provide this functionality with functions named stricmp or strcmpi. To compare a subset of both strings with case-insensitivity, various systems may provide strncasecmp, strnicmp or strncmpi. Example #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> int main (int argc, char **argv) { int v; if (argc < 3) { fprintf (stderr, "Compares two strings\nUsage: %s string1 string2\n",argv[0]); return EXIT_FAILURE; } v = strcmp (argv[1], argv[2]); if (v < 0) printf ("'%s' is less than '%s'.\n", argv[1], argv[2]); else if (v == 0) printf ("'%s' equals '%s'.\n", argv[1], argv[2]); else if (v > 0) printf ("'%s' is greater than '%s'.\n", argv[1], argv[2]); return 0; } The above code is a working sample that prints whether the first argument is less than, equal to or greater than the second. A possible implementation is (P.J. Plauger, The Standard C Library, 1992): int strcmp (const char * s1, const char * s2) { for(; *s1 == *s2; ++s1, ++s2) if(*s1 == 0) return 0; return *(unsigned char *)s1 < *(unsigned char *)s2 ? -1 : 1; } However, most real-world implementations will have various optimization tricks to reduce the execution time of the function. One will notice, that strcmp not only returns -1, 0 and +1, but also other negative or positive values, resulting from optimizing away the branching introduced by the ?: operator: return *(const unsigned char *)s1 - *(const unsigned char *)s2; See also External links C++ reference for std::strcmp deep