Data Structure Arrays Interview Question:

Can you please explain the difference between string and an array?

Submitted by: Muhammad

An array is an array of anything. A string is a specific kind of an array with a well-known convention to determine its length.
There are two kinds of programming languages: those in which a string is just an array of characters, and those in which it's a special type. In C, a string is just an array of characters (type char), with one wrinkle: a C string always ends with a NUL character. The "value" of an array is the same as the address of (or a pointer to) the first element; so, frequently, a C string and a pointer to char are used to mean the same thing.
An array can be any length. If it's passed to a function, there's no way the function can tell how long the array is supposed to be, unless some convention is used. The convention for strings is NUL termination; the last character is an ASCII NUL ('') character.

String literals are arrays of characters (type char), not arrays of constant characters (type const char). The ANSI C committee could have redefined them to be arrays of const char, but millions of lines of code would have screamed in terror and suddenly not compiled. The compiler won't stop you from trying to modify the contents of a string literal. You shouldn't do it, though. A compiler can choose to put string literals in some part of memory that can't be modified-in ROM, or somewhere the memory mapping registers will forbid writes. Even if string literals are someplace where they could be modified, the compiler can make them shared.
Submitted by: Muhammad