How does concatenation of two string literals work?
It's defined by the ISO C standard, adjacent string literals are combined into a single one.
The language is a little dry (it is a standard after all) but section 6.4.5 String literals
of C11
states:
In translation phase 6, the multibyte character sequences specified by any sequence of adjacent character and identically-prefixed wide string literal tokens are concatenated into a single multibyte character sequence.
This is also mentioned in 5.1.1.2 Translation phases, point 6
of the same standard, though a little more succinctly:
Adjacent string literal tokens are concatenated.
This basically means that "abc" "def"
is no different to "abcdef"
.
It's often useful for making long strings while still having nice formatting, something like:
const char *myString = "This is a really long "
"string and I don't want "
"to make my lines in the "
"editor too long, because "
"I'm basically anal retentive :-)";
And to answer your unasked question, "What is this good for?"
For one thing, you can put constants in string literals. You can write
#define FIRST "John"
#define LAST "Doe"
const char* name = FIRST " " LAST;
const char* salutation = "Dear " FIRST ",";
and then if you'll need to change the name later, you'll only have to change it in one spot.
Things like that.