###### (This is the documentation for SDL3, which is under heavy development and the API is changing! [SDL2](https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL2/) is the current stable version!)
# SDL_strncmp

Compare two UTF-8 strings up to a number of bytes.

## Header File

Defined in [<SDL3/SDL_stdinc.h>](https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/include/SDL3/SDL_stdinc.h)

## Syntax

```c
int SDL_strncmp(const char *str1, const char *str2, size_t maxlen);

```

## Function Parameters

|                |                                                      |
| -------------- | ---------------------------------------------------- |
| **str1**       | The first string to compare. NULL is not permitted!  |
| **str2**       | The second string to compare. NULL is not permitted! |
| **maxlen**     | The maximum number of _bytes_ to compare.            |

## Return Value

Returns less than zero if str1 is "less than" str2, greater than zero if
str1 is "greater than" str2, and zero if the strings match exactly.

## Remarks

Due to the nature of UTF-8 encoding, this will work with Unicode strings,
since effectively this function just compares bytes until it hits a
null-terminating character. Also due to the nature of UTF-8, this can be
used with [SDL_qsort](SDL_qsort)() to put strings in (roughly) alphabetical
order.

Note that while this function is intended to be used with UTF-8, it is
doing a bytewise comparison, and `maxlen` specifies a _byte_ limit! If the
limit lands in the middle of a multi-byte UTF-8 sequence, it will only
compare a portion of the final character.

`maxlen` specifies a maximum number of bytes to compare; if the strings
match to this number of bytes (or both have matched to a null-terminator
character before this number of bytes), they will be considered equal.

## Thread Safety

It is safe to call this function from any thread.

## Version

This function is available since SDL 3.0.0.

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[CategoryAPI](CategoryAPI), [CategoryAPIFunction](CategoryAPIFunction)