strchr(3)

💖 strchr(3) — string search character 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the strchr page from the Library Functions Manual ✨ it's giving "find the first matching letter and go feral" energy and honestly? we're obsessed. let's get into it 🎀

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🌸 NAME 🌸

strchr — string search character 🔍

no cap, that's literally it. we're hunting a character inside a string.

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📚 LIBRARY 📚

Standard C library — link with -lc 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

#include <string.h>

char *strchr(const char *s, int c);

like always, pull in <string.h> first or the compiler will simply not know her 💅

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💫 DESCRIPTION 💫

so strchr() hands you back a pointer to the first occurrence of the character c inside the string s. first one only. she does not care about the rest 👑

and get this, she's equivalent to both of these expressions (yes, both, iconic behavior):

memchr(s, c, strlen(s) + 1)
strpbrk(s, (char [2]){c, '\0'})

main character energy fr fr 🌈

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🎀 RETURN VALUE 🎀

strchr() returns a pointer to the matched character — or NULL if that character is nowhere to be found 😭 like, not in the string at all.

BUT here's the tea 🍓: the terminating null byte is considered part of the string. so if you pass c as '\0', strchr() happily returns a pointer to the terminator itself. she is in there. she counts. periodt 💀

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🦋 ATTRIBUTES 🦋

for the whole explanation of what these terms even mean, go peek at attributes(7) — she explains it better than I can ngl 💜

• Interface — strchr()
• Attribute — Thread safety
• Value — MT-Safe 🔥

translation: safe to call from multiple threads at once, no drama, no chaos, no vibe check failures ✨

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⭐ STANDARDS ⭐

• C11
• POSIX.1-2008

certified, standards-approved, no notes 👑

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🌈 HISTORY 🌈

she's been around. like, around around:

• POSIX.1-2001
• C89
• SVr4
• 4.3BSD

a true legacy icon, we stan a consistently reliable function 💅

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

the whole girl group, if you wanna meet the rest of the fam:

• memchr(3)
• string(3)
• strchrnul(3)
• strnul(3)
• strpbrk(3)
• strrchr(3)
• strsep(3)
• strspn(3)
• strstr(3)
• wcschr(3)

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that's the whole page bestie, go forth and find your characters 🧚💖

this has been Linux man-pages 6.20, dated 2026-08-10, signing off — stay slaying, stay MT-Safe, and always null-terminate ur strings 🫶✨