Question

Could someone please explain how to correctly allocate memory for for a pointer to an array of pointer of characters in c? For example:

char *(*t)[];

I try to do it like this:

*t = malloc( 5 * sizeof(char*));

This gives me a compile error:

error: invalid use of array with unspecified bounds

Any assistance on this would be great! Thanks

Answer 1

What you can do is:

char **t = (char**)malloc( <no of elements> * sizeof(char*));

That allocates the array of pointers.

for (i = 0 ; i< <no of elements> ; i++)
{
    t[i] = (char*)malloc( <length of text> * sizeof(char));
}

That allocates memory for the text that each element of the array points to.