Should I cast arrays to pointers when passing them to variadic functions like printf?

Question

Can I pass an array to printf directly:

char text[1024] = "text";
printf("%s", text);

Or should I explicitly cast it to a char pointer:

char text[1024] = "text";
printf("%s", (char*) text);

I'm asking because I thought maybe it copies the array elements directly into the va_list instead of putting just a pointer to the first element.

Answer 1

Yes, you can pass an array directly. Exactly, name of array represents address of the array which makes no difference with char *.

Answer 2

(char*)text and text hardly make any difference in this example! Base address of an array decays into a pointer when passed as a function argument.

In fact, even if text was not a char array, still it would hardly make any difference to printf because it is a variable argument function

int printf(const char *format, ...);

and all it cares is about the first argument. Logic might go wrong but printf doesn't care!