Input in Null terminating character array and getting its length

Question

I hava a question.....I have a character array char command[30]. When I use it for input like if I entered !! on console the after input strlength function must give me length of array equals to 2 as it does not count null character. But It is giving me 3 as length of array. Why is it happening.

    char command[30];
    fgets(command,30,stdin);
    printf("%zu",strlen(command));

Answer 1

It's probably including the newline character - the Enter key.

Try this to remove the newine character, then strlen should be as you expect:

command[strcspn(command, "\n")] = 0;

Answer 2

fgets adds the newline character '\n' to the characters you type in, adding an extra character to the length of the string. So if you type !! and hit "Enter", the characters '!', '!', and '\n', get stored in your command[] array. Thus, the strlen() function returns the length of your string as 3, instead of 2. To fix this, just subtract 1 from the result of the strlen() function, and write a null zero ('\0') to the position where the the '\n' was.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void)
{
    char command[30];
    
    printf("Enter text: ");

    fgets(command, 30, stdin);

    int length = strlen(command);

    command[length - 1] = '\0';

    printf("String length is %lu\n", strlen(command));

    return 0;
}