integer variable starts at 1024?

I am following code academy's path to learning c and ran into a weird issue. When running my code the variable "a" has an initial variable of 1024? Can someone help me uderstand or lead me in the right direction to crafting a better google query? Very new to the language so all feedback is greatly appreciated. Ignore my awful code and random comments. I was trying to troubleshoot the error and went all over the place.

Code:

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

int main () {
  int counter1[4] = {0, 0, 0, 0};
  int counter2[4] = {0, 0, 0, 0};

  char string1[] = {"dbb cccccaacb cdbababdcdcdab dcdad"};
  char string2[] = {"bbbcc bdddccccad cdbbaaacaccdabdd"};
  char mainvar;

  int a,b,c,d = 0;
  printf("[+]%i[+]\n\n", a);

  for (int z = 0; z < strlen(string1); z++) {
  
    mainvar = string1[z];
    printf("%c\n", mainvar);
    if (mainvar == 'a') {
      a += 1;
      printf("%i\n", a);
      counter1[0] = a;
      //printf("InLoop %i\n", a);
      //printf("%i", counter1[0]);
    } else if (mainvar == 'b') {
        b += 1;
        counter1[1] = b;
        //printf("InLoop %i\n", b);
    } else if (mainvar == 'c') {
        c += 1;
        counter1[2] = c;
        //printf("%i", counter1[2]);
    } else if (mainvar == 'd') {
        d += 1;
        counter1[3] = d;
        //printf("%i", counter1[3]);
    }

    //printf("%i\t%i\t%i\t%i\n", counter1[0],counter1[1],counter1[2],counter1[3]);


  
   // for (int x = 0; x < strlen(string2); x++) {

    //}
  }

    printf("\n%i", counter1[0]);
    printf("\n%i", counter1[1]);
    printf("\n%i", counter1[2]);
    printf("\n%i", counter1[3]);
}

 

I found my solution. It won't let me post the link but if you search /7565794/assign-single-value-to-multiple-variables @ google it is the first result.

I was defining multiple variables incorrectly. In the above link the user DipSwitch explains you can do it either way below

"You can do it two ways:
char r = 0, g = 0, b = 0;
or
char r, g, b;
r = g = b = 0;"

This was a simple mistake on my end.

 

It seems like you're encountering an issue with the variable a having an initial value of 1024. Let's take a look at your code:

int a,b,c,d = 0;

In C, when you declare multiple variables on a single line like this, only the last variable (d in this case) is initialized to 0. The variables a, b, and c are not explicitly initialized, so they will contain garbage values (values from whatever happened to be in memory at that location). That's why a seems to have an initial value of 1024.

To fix this, you need to explicitly initialize all variables to 0:

int a = 0, b = 0, c = 0, d = 0;


This way, all variables will start with a value of 0, and you won't encounter unexpected values.

Also, a small note regarding your loop:

for (int z = 0; z < strlen(string1); z++) {


Calling strlen(string1) in each iteration of the loop can be inefficient, especially if string1 is long. It's better to calculate the length once outside the loop and store it in a variable. For example:

int length1 = strlen(string1);
for (int z = 0; z < length1; z++) {