Weird return value in strcmp [duplicate]

Question

While checking the return value of strcmp function, I found some strange behavior in gcc. Here's my code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

char str0[] = "hello world!";
char str1[] = "Hello world!";

int main() {
    printf("%d\n", strcmp("hello world!", "Hello world!"));
    printf("%d\n", strcmp(str0, str1));
}

When I compile this with clang, both calls to strcmp return 32. However, when compiling with gcc, the first call returns 1, and the second call returns 32. I don't understand why the first and second calls to strcmp return different values when compiled using gcc.

Below is my test environment.

• Ubuntu 18.04 64bit
• gcc 7.3.0
• clang 6.0.0

Answer 1

It looks like you didn't enable optimizations (e.g. -O2).

From my tests it looks like gcc always recognizes strcmp with constant arguments and optimizes it, even with -O0 (no optimizations). Clang needs at least -O1 to do so.

That's where the difference comes from: The code produced by clang calls strcmp twice, but the code produced by gcc just does printf("%d\n", 1) in the first case because it knows that 'h' > 'H' (ASCIIbetically, that is). It's just constant folding, really.

Live example: https://godbolt.org/z/8Hg-gI

As the other answers explain, any positive value will do to indicate that the first string is greater than the second, so the compiler optimizer simply chooses 1. The strcmp library function apparently uses a different value.

Answer 2

The standard defines the result of strcmp to be negative, if lhs appears before rhs in lexical order, zero if they are equal, or a positive value if lhs appears lexically after rhs.

It's up to the implementation how to implement that and what exactly to return. You must not depend on a specific value in your programs, or they won't be portable. Simply check with comparisons (<, >, ==).

See https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/byte/strcmp

Background

One simple implementation might just calculate the difference of each character c1 - c2 and do that until the result is not zero, or one of the strings ends. The result will then be the numeric difference between the first character, in which the two strings differed.

For example, this GLibC implementation: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob_plain;f=string/strcmp.c;hb=HEAD

Answer 3

The strcmp function is only specified to return a value larger than zero, zero, or less than zero. There's nothing specified what those positive and negative values have to be.