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C program to sort strings in alphabetical order

Here, we are going to learn how to sort strings in alphabetical order in C programming language?
Submitted by Nidhi, on July 17, 2021

Problem statement

Given an array of strings, we have to sort the given strings in alphabetical order using C program.

C program to sort strings in alphabetical order

The source code to sort strings in alphabetical order is given below. The given program is compiled and executed using GCC compile on UBUNTU 18.04 OS successfully.

// C program to sort strings in the alphabetical order

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main()
{
    char name[5][7] = { "Virat", "Rohit", "Shikar", "Hardik", "Risabh" };
    char temp[7];

    int i = 0, j = 0;

    printf("Names before sorting: \n");
    for (i = 0; i < 5; i++)
        printf("  %s\n", name[i]);

    for (i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
        for (j = i + 1; j < 5; j++) {
            if (strcmp(name[i], name[j]) > 0) {
                strcpy(temp, name[i]);
                strcpy(name[i], name[j]);
                strcpy(name[j], temp);
            }
        }
    }

    printf("Sorted names: \n");
    for (i = 0; i < 5; i++)
        printf("  %s\n", name[i]);

    return 0;
}

Output

Names before sorting: 
  Virat
  Rohit
  Shikar
  Hardik
  Risabh
Sorted names: 
  Hardik
  Risabh
  Rohit
  Shikar
  Virat

Explanation

Here, we created an array of 5 strings name that contains the name of persons. Then we sort the names into alphabetical order. After that, we printed the sorted array of names on the console screen.

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