Question

I am having trouble with my Int2String method. I am new to C so I am not sure if this would be the correct way to go about it. I’m receiving a few error messages:

error: conflicting types for ‘int2String’
warning: return makes integer from pointer without a cast

Here is my method:

char int2String(int num, char intStr[10]) {
char itoa(num, intStr[10]);
return itoa;
}

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

In your code

char itoa(num, intStr[10]);
return itoa;

tells the compiler that you declare a function called itoa with specific signature, then you want to return (a pointer to) this function. Since you declared the return type as char, the compiler doesn’t like this.

It should rather look something like

char int2String(int num, char intStr[10]) {
  char ch = itoa(num, intStr);
  return ch;
}

i.e. call the function itoa with given parameters, store its return value in a local variable of type char, then return it. (The local variable could be inlined to simplify the code.)

Now this still does not make the compiler happy, since itoa, although not part of the standard, is by convention declared to return char*, and to take 3 parameters, not 2. (Unless you use a nonstandard definition if itoa, that is.)

With the “standard” itoa version, this modification should work (in theory at least – I have not tested it 🙂

char* int2String(int num, char intStr[10]) {
  return itoa(num, intStr, 10);
}