Esoteric Chat

Need guides on learning how pointers work and when I should be using them… is the main reason why im not learning c.

here's what I got so far:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
char message [] = "The raids will never stop";
char * message_POINTER = message;

while(1) {
char characTer = *(message_POINTER++);
if(characTer == '\0') break;
else {
printf("%c", characTer);
}
}

printf("\n");
return 9;
}

Pointers are pretty self-explanatory. "When to use pointers" should be whenever you can, in my opinion.

This can be simplified to:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
  char message [] = "The raids will never stop";
  printf("%s\n", message);
  return 0;
}

I don't know why you're returning 9 (returning 0 is the standard thing to do), you really don't need to print a string character by character. Did you get this code from somewhere else or did you write it yourself? In any case the %s formatting tag will print any valid (null-terminated) string so there is no need for whatever it is that was going on before.

If you did want to loop through a string character by character, you would just index it like an array. E.g:

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

int main() {
  char message[] = "The raids will never stop";
  for (int i = 0; i < strlen(message); i++) {
    printf("%c", message[i]);
  }
  printf("\n");
  return 0;
}

Ultimately it isn't that complicated, and it's best to not make it complicated needlessly. Maybe a language like python would be more your speed, but C isn't difficult when you know what you're doing.

One last thing, you generally use pointers when you want to be able to dynamically allocate and de-allocate memory (variables). I.E. writing efficient programs that only use memory when it's needed and free it up immediately once they're done with it.