Pass a char pointer array to a function in C?
I have the following code:
int main(){
char **array;
char a[5];
int n = 5;
array = malloc(n *sizeof *array);
/*Some code to assign array values*/
test(a, array);
return 0;
}
int test(char s1, char **s2){
if(strcmp(s1, s2[0]) != 0)
return 1;
return 0;
}
I'm trying to pass char and char pointer array to a function, but the above code results in the following errors and warnings:
temp.c: In function ‘main’: temp.c:6:5: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘malloc’ [-Wimplicit-function-declaration] temp.c:6:13: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘malloc’ [enabled by default] temp.c:10:5: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘test’ [-Wimplicit-function-declaration] temp.c: At top level: temp.c:15:5: error: conflicting types for ‘test’ temp.c:15:1: note: an argument type that has a default promotion can’t match an empty parameter name list declaration temp.c:10:5: note: previous implicit declaration of ‘test’ was here temp.c: In function ‘test’: temp.c:16:5: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘strcmp’ [-Wimplicit-function-declaration]
I'm trying to understand what the problem is.
First of all, you should include the necessary header files. For strcmp
you need <string.h>
, for malloc
<malloc.h>
. Also you need to at least declare test before main. If you do this you'll notice the following error:
temp.c: In function ‘test’: temp.c:20:5: warning: passing argument 1 of ‘strcmp’ makes pointer from integer without a cast [enabled by default] /usr/include/string.h:143:12: note: expected ‘const char *’ but argument is of type ‘char’
This indicates that test()
should have a char *
as first argument. All in all your code should look like this:
#include <string.h> /* for strcmp */
#include <malloc.h> /* for malloc */
int test(char*,char**); /* added declaration */
int main(){
char **array;
char a[5];
int n = 5;
array = malloc(sizeof(*array));
array[0] = malloc(n * sizeof(**array));
/*Some code to assign array values*/
test(a, array);
free(*array); /* free the not longer needed memory */
free(array);
return 0;
}
int test(char * s1, char **s2){ /* changed to char* */
if(strcmp(s1, s2[0]) != 0) /* have a look at the comment after the code */
return 1;
return 0;
}
Edit
Please notice that strcmp
works with null-terminated byte strings. If neither s1
nor s2
contain a null byte the call in test
will result in a segmentation fault:
[1] 14940 segmentation fault (core dumped) ./a.out
Either make sure that both contain a null byte '