help with String manipulation

Not without terminating zeros. Go ahead and try.

The initial string is, presumably, NULL terminated. The atoi() function stops processing when it encounters a NULL or when it encounters some non-integer character. So, NULL terminating is not technically required, since it is the original array that is being passed to atoi(), twice.

If the parts of the original array were copied to other arrays, then, the copies would need to be NULL terminated.