String comparison in if statement not working

Question

I am new in C programming. Can you please advise, what's wrong with my code? It looks like the if statement is not working, and instead it's jumping and printing the else statement.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{
    char profession;

    printf("what is your profession? \n");
    scanf(" %s", profession);

    if(profession==“QA”)
    {
        printf(“Go and Test\n“);
    }
    else
    {
        printf("Do whatever you want");
    }

    return 0;
}

Nope - cannot compare null-terminated char arrays like that. It's also a multi-dup. — Martin James, Mar 16 '16 at 23:27
You have multiple errors which show some missconception. Your compiler should warn already (if not, enable warnings). Please read a C book about pointers, arrays and string literals (and the rest). — too honest for this site, Mar 16 '16 at 23:39

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 16 '16 at 23:36

First of all, you can't compare strings like that in C. use strcmp or strncmp instead.

Secondly, in your code, profession is a char, and you want to put a string (several chars) in it. It won't work. You can create a char * (pointer on a char) (without forgetting to malloc() it) or a char [] (a char array).

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 17 '16 at 00:13

Firstly, strings in C are array of characters, so you have to declare profession as a pointer, pointing to an array of characters. So that statement will look like this char* profession, secondly, you have to use a method called strcmp(char* a, char* b) that accepts two char pointers. This will return 0 if they are equal. I will include the answer, but I assume there are better ways of writing this code.

int main() {

    char* profession;
    char* compare = "QA";
    printf("What is your profession?\n");

    scanf(" %s", profession);

    if(strcmp(profession, compare) == 0) {
            printf("Go and Test\n");
    } else {
            printf("Do whatever you want");
    }

    return 0;
}

Thank you for the clarification and solution as well – Sus Mar 17 '16 at 00:50 — Sus, Mar 17 '16 at 00:50

String comparison in if statement not working

2 Answers2