将两个日期比较为C中的char数组

Question

Bear with my guys this is my second stackoverflow question, please point me in the right direction if I'm doing this wrong

I have two dates as chars.

I print out the dates:

printf("%s - %s\n",tmpPtr->date, currentDate);

And I have an if statement which is always executed

if(tmpPtr->date != currentDate) {       // perhaps strcmp(), don't know
  printf("Dates are not equal\n");
}

But this cannot be true because these are my results:

27/12/2015 - 27/12/2015
Dates are not equal
27/12/2015 - 27/12/2015
Dates are not equal
28/12/2015 - 27/12/2015
Dates are not equal
29/12/2015 - 28/12/2015
Dates are not equal
29/12/2015 - 29/12/2015
Dates are not equal
29/12/2015 - 29/12/2015
Dates are not equal
30/12/2015 - 29/12/2015
Dates are not equal
31/12/2015 - 30/12/2015
Dates are not equal
31/12/2015 - 31/12/2015
Dates are not equal

This can't be true because some dates are equal?

Am I comparing the strings correctly? Is it just comparing the memory allocation or something of the sort?

Answer 1

In order to compare strings, use strcmp() like this :

if (strcmp(tmpPtr->date,currentDate) != 0) {      
    printf("Dates are not equal\n");
}

Answer 2

If dates are in the same format which seems to be the case, then use strcmp . Otherwise parse them and compare year, month and date of one string to corresponding fields of the other.