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Strings are a fundamental concept in software engineering, but they are not a built-in type in C. Null-terminated byte strings (NTBS) consist of a contiguous sequence of characters terminated by and including the first NULL null character and are supported in C as the format used for string literals. The C programming language supports single-byte character strings, multibyte character strings, and wide character strings. Single-byte and multibyte character strings are both described as NULLnull-terminated byte strings, which are also referred to as "narrow character strings."

A pointer to a null-terminated byte string points to its initial character. The length of the string is the number of bytes preceding the NULL null character, and the value of the string is the sequence of the values of the contained characters, in order.

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• Used internally for string comparison functions, even though these operate on character data.  ThereforeConsequently, the result of a string comparison does not depend on whether plain char is signed.
• Used for situations where the object being manipulated might be of any type, and it is necessary to access all bits of that object, as with fwrite().

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\[[ISO/IEC TR 24731-1-:2007|AA. C References#ISO/IEC TR 24731-1-2007]\]
\[[ISO/IEC 9899-:1999|AA. C References#ISO/IEC 9899-1999]\] Section 7.1.1, "Definitions of terms," and Section 7.21, "String handling <string.h>"
\[[Seacord 05a|AA. C References#Seacord 05a]\] Chapter 2, "Strings"

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