Question

I have a function that returns a struct (not a struct pointer), but when trying to set the return value to a struct variable of the same type, I get “incompatible types.”

This is what the struct definition and function implementation look like:

typedef struct{
    int ssn;
    char FirstName[12];
    char LastName[12];
    int income;
} MyRecord;

MyRecord parseNextRecord()
{
    MyRecord record;
    // parse and initialize
    return record;
}

And this is me calling it from within my main function:

MyRecord nextRecord;
nextRecord = parseNextRecord(); // "error: incompatible types in assignment"

Really stumped about this. Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Without seeing the header file, the probable cause is that main() does not see a declaration of the parseNextRecord() function which results in the compiler generating an implicit declaration for it, with a return type of int. This will cause the incompatible assignment error as it is not possible to assign an int to a MyRecord. To resolve, add declaration to the header file:

extern MyRecord parseNextRecord();