Text is everywhere
Almost every program reads, manipulates and prints text. C represents text as a string — a sequence of characters. Strings are immutable in many languages, meaning every "change" actually produces a brand new string and leaves the original alone.
#include <string.h>
char name[] = "PlayLearn";
printf("%lu\n", strlen(name));
char greet[64];
sprintf(greet, "Hello, %s!", name);Common string operations
Concatenation joins two strings together. Slicing extracts a portion. Searching finds whether a substring exists. Splitting breaks a string into pieces around a separator. Replacing swaps one substring for another. These five operations cover the vast majority of real-world text work.
Formatting and templates
When you need to drop variables into a string, prefer the language's built-in template syntax over manual concatenation. It is shorter, harder to get wrong, and produces clearer code that other developers can scan in a glance.