Question

I am studying the memset function now, but all the examples are regarding to char array as following:

char a[100];
memset(a, 0, 100);

it will set every element in this char array to 0.

I wondered if memset can apply to int array or float array?

Answer 1

Yes, it can apply to any memory buffer, but you must input the correct memory buffer size … memset treats any memory buffer as a series of bytes, so whether it’s char, int, float, double, etc, doesn’t really matter. Keep in mind though that it will not set multi-byte types to a specific non-zero value … for example:

int a[100];
memset(a, 1, sizeof(a));

will not set each member of a to the value 1 … rather it will set every byte in the memory buffer taken up by a to 1, which means every four-byte int will be set to the value 0x01010101, which is not the same as 0x00000001