its still not as easy as in languages with modern libraries.<p>a = &quot;foo&quot; + &quot;bar&quot;; is very useful so is b = a.split( &quot;,&quot; ); or a = b.trim(); etc. C strings are rarely so convenient.<p>its more obvious with the more high level things you want. to do something like b = a.split( &quot;,&quot; ); on a string that is not know until runtime you need dynamic allocations and you could use strtok to fill that memory with the results, but its an error-prone ballache by comparison.