在C中访问字符串数组的第一个元素

Question

It might be a newbie question but here is my problem:

I want to declare an array of strings but when I access the first element, the other elements gets concatenated with it.

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
    char words[2][3] = {"foo", "bar"};
    printf("%s\n", words[0]); // I want to print foo
    printf("%s\n", words[1]); // I want to print bar
}

Which outputs

foobar
bar

although I was expecting

foo
bar

Can someone explain:

1. What just happened ?
2. How do I get the behaviour that I was expecting ?

Answer 1

Your array word doesn't have sufficient space for the null bytes at the ends of the strings and it results in undefined behaviour as you attempt to print the elements as C-string (using %s ). Increase the array size:

char words[2][4] = {"foo", "bar"};