"arrays of integers"? You mean, unsigned short ints? There's an important difference. One references an abstraction, and one references a concrete machine type.
The other consideration is knowing what you mean by "string", if you mean something to be interpreted textually, then the convention is to use unsigned chars to document your intentions, which "technically" is the same (as far as memory layout is concerned). (I say "technically" because there is some space reserved for endian-ness which can change the bit ordering.)
One mistake I already wish to correct is in the last sentence: "endian-ness" *always* changes or refers to the bit ordering. Secondly, the term only applies to numerical (always integer, AFAIK) representation -- not for chars. Trying to be complete... MarkJ