C or C++. How to compare two strings given char * pointers?

Question

I am sorting my array of car two ways. one by year which is shown below. and another one by make. Make is a char* How do I compare strings when I just have pointers to them?

int i, j;
for(i=0; i<100; i++){
    for(j=0; j<100-i; j++){
        if(carArray[i]!=NULL && carArray[j]!= NULL && carArray[j+1]!=NULL){
            if(carArray[i]->year > carArray[j+1]->year){
                swap(carArray[j], carArray[j+1]);
            }
        }
    }
}

The above method works for int's (year). How can I make it work for char pointers?

Answer 1

In pretty much either one, the way is to call strcmp. If your strings (for some weird reason) aren't NUL terminated, you should use strncmp instead.

However, in C++ you really shouldn't be manipulating strings in char arrays if you can reasonably avoid it. Use std::string instead.