What is the proper function for comparing two C-style strings?

Solution 1:

For general string comparisons, strcmp is the appropriate function. You should use strncmp to only compare some number of characters from a string (for example, a prefix), and memcmp to compare blocks of memory.

That said, since you're using C++, you should avoid this altogether and use the std::string class, which is much easier to use and generally safer than C-style strings. You can compare two std::strings for equality easily by just using the == operator.

Hope this helps!

Solution 2:

Both memcmp and strcmp will work fine. To use the former, you'll need to know the length of the shorter string in advance.