Question

For example, I have in the main file

1) char ** array[NUMBER];
2) array = build_array();

and in an imported file

char ** build_array()
{
  char ** array[NUMBER];
  strings[0] = "A";
  strings[1] = "B";
  return (char *) strings;
}

However, at line 2 in the main file, I get the error: "incompatible types when assigning to type 'char **[(unsighed int)NUMBER]' from type 'char **'

What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

There seem to be some confusion about what a string is in C. In C, a null terminated sequence of chars is considered a string. It is usually represented by char*.

I just want to call the build_array() function and return the array of strings

You pretty much can’t return an array, neither a pointer to a local array. You could however pass the array to build_array as an argument, as well as its size, and fill that instead.

void build_array( char* strings[], size_t size )
{
  // make sure size >= 2 here, based on your actual logic
  strings[0] = "A";
  strings[1] = "B";
}
...later called as:...
char *array[NUMBER];
build_array(array, NUMBER);

The alternatives are to return a pointer to a global or static allocated array, which would make your function non-reentrant. You probably don’t care about this now, but is bad practice so I would recommend you avoid going that route.