Why comparing strings in C doesn't work?

Question

I have the following program

main()
{

    char name[4] = "sara";
    char vname[4] = "sara";

    if(strcmp(name, vname) == 0)
    {
        printf("\nOK");
    }
    else
    {
        printf("\nError");
    }

}

This program always prints "Error"... what is the issue here help me

but if I change char vname[] = "sara", then it prints out "OK"... why??

Answer 1

You are hard-sizing your arrays so that they are too short for the strings (they don't include an additional character for the null terminator). As a result, strcmp is running past the end of the strings when doing the comparison, producing essentially unpredictable results. You're lucky to not be getting a seg fault.

Answer 2

Forgive me if this is off track, since I haven't done C in ages!

main()
{
    char name[] = "sara";
    char vname[] = "sara";

    if(strcmp(name, vname) == 0)
    {
        printf("\nOK");
    }
    else
    {
        printf("\nError");
    }
}

You've specified hard lengths for your char arrays, but in C, strings are null terminated, so "sara" actually needs len 5, not 4.