Question

Context: I’m trying to do is to make a program which would take text as input and store it in a character array. Then I would print each element of the array as a decimal. E.g. “Hello World” would be converted to 72, 101, etc.. I would use this as a quick ASCII2DEC converter. I know there are online converters but I’m trying to make this one on my own.

Problem: how can I allocate an array whose size is unknown at compile-time and make it the exact same size as the text I enter? So when I enter “Hello World” it would dynamically make an array with the exact size required to store just “Hello World”. I have searched the web but couldn’t find anything that I could make use of.

Answer 1

I see that you’re using C. You could do something like this:

 #define INC_SIZE 10

 char *buf = (char*) malloc(INC_SIZE),*temp;
 int size = INC_SIZE,len = 0;
 char c;

 while ((c = getchar()) != '\n') { // I assume you want to read a line of input
   if (len == size) {
     size += INC_SIZE;
     temp = (char*) realloc(buf,size);
     if (temp == NULL) {
       // not enough memory probably, handle it yourself
     }
     buf = temp;
   }
   buf[len++] = c;
 }
 // done, note that the character array has no '\0' terminator and the length is represented by `len` variable