Question

I have a question. I have the following struct:

typedef struct{
    int vin;
    char* make;
    char* model;
    int year;
    double fee;
}car;

Then I have the following method that asks the user for the make of a car and returns it as a char pointer:

char* askMake(){
    char* tempMake = NULL;
    cout << "Enter Make:" << endl;
    cin >> tempMake;
    return tempMake;
}

Then I have a temp car struct:

car tempCar;

And I am trying to assign a value to it this way:

tempCar.make = askMake();

It compiles fine, but I get a segmentation fault at runtime.

Answer 1

You have to allocate memory for tempMake.

Try this:

char* askMake(){
    char* tempMake = new char[1024]; //Arbitrary size
    cout << "Enter Make:" << endl;
    cin >> tempMake;
    return tempMake;
}

Don’t forget to free with delete[] the memory that you allocated.

If you don’t want memory leaks, you can avoid this using smart pointers like boost::shared_ptr or boost::scoped_ptr or similar. You can see more about this here.