Trouble with strings in C

Question

I'm newbie in C world and I have two probably stupid questions.

I'm reading about structures in C and here is where I stuck. Let say we have structure like this

typedef structs {
  char model[50];
  int yearOfManufacture;
  int price;
} Car;

Car Ford;
Ford.yearOfManufacture = 1997;
Ford.price = 3000;

//The line below gives me an error "Array type char[50] is not assignable
Ford.model = "Focus"

How to pass text into Ford.model in that case ?

My second question is also about strings. This code works fine

char model[50] = "Focus";
printf("Model is %s", model);

But this one doesn't

char model[50];
model = "Focus";

Can anyone explain why it doesn't work ?

Answer 1

That's not how you copy strings in C. Try

strcpy(Ford.model, "Focus");

Alternatively (but with very different semantics):

typedef structs {
  char const *model;
  int yearOfManufacture;
  int price;
} Car;

model = "Focus";

These C FAQs explain more about the issue:

• Assign to array
• How can an array be an lvalue, if you can't assign to it?