Question

i am writing a simple program and would like to use the strlen function to get the size of the string in question.

Then i would like to create an array for example testarray[strlen(somestring)];

But it cannot compile, the error says “error: variable-sized object may not be initialized”.

However, the length of that string will not change so i guess i have to tell my machine that somehow.

I have only access to these headers.

stdio.h
string.h

Would be great if somebody could drop some knowledge bombs. 🙂

edit:
I was wrong testarray[strlen(somestring)]; can compile but testarray[strlen(somestring)] = {}; cannot. With testarray[strlen(somestring)]; i have garbage if i try to use it.

Thanks guys, it is working now with memset!

Answer 1

You need to initialize the memory in temp to 0. This is what the empty brackets {} did in your original code. Either use memset

memset(temp, 0, sizeof(temp));

Or a for loop (since you don’t have malloc/free you may not have memset).

int length = sizeof(temp);
int i;
for (i = 0; i < length; ++i)
{
   temp[i] = 0;
}