Removing null terminator at the end of the string

Im trying to scan a character from input , i have tried all method , scanf() getline() fgets() but all contains null terminator '\0' at the end which is unwanted for me . How can i strip it? I have tried

char *p=strtok(string,'\0\') 

but it didnt work. How can i do it? I am scanning strings usgin getline() into an array of string , which works fine and i want to input an "needle" which i am trying to scanf with getline() too and than use strstr to find match but '\0' is causing no match

Generally, you should not remove the null terminating character from a string. If you do and you pass the string to any of the functions in string.h(and some functions in other libraries as well), the program will crash.

i need it to strip it bcs i am want to use this string as needle in strstr() and with '\0' it only matches the end of the string

strstr requires both arguments to be NULL-terminated strings, so you shouldn't do that. Please post a Minimal, Complete, Verifiable Example that illustrates the problem and your attempt at it.

You should explain your other problem because I think you're trying to fix it incorrectly. When using strings in C, the null terminator is required in order to know where the end of the string is.

3 Answers 3

You asked how to remove the NUL terminator from the end of a string. You can do that by overwriting it with something else (say, the letter 'a'):

str[strlen(str)] = 'a'; 

Note that C does not have a way to "remove" something from an array (including a string, which is an array of char s); array elements always exist (until the whole array is destroyed), and they can only be overwritten with other values.

C uses null-terminated strings which means that all library functions that are intended to work with "strings" will give you and expect to be given an array of characters follow by a null terminator.

You can copy all the bytes from the string except the null terminator into a new char array:

char buffer[strlen(string)]; memcpy(buffer, string, strlen(string)); p* = buffer; 

Note: strlen doesn't include the null terminating character in the character count

But if you pass p* as parameter to a function that expects a string then expect problems at runtime. You've been warned :)