Question

I have a struct like this

typedef struct bookStruct
{
   char title[80];
   char author[80];
} BookType;

And I have two strings like this

char *title = "A Book on C";
char *author = "A. Kelly";

Now I can’t create a BookType like this

BookType book = {title, author};

Can anyone tell me what is wrong? How can I do that?

Answer 1

There are two possible solutions to your problem. The first of which is using the string literals in the place of construction:

BookType book = { "A book on C", "A. Kelly" };

In this case the compiler will copy the literals to the appropriate variables. If you cannot use the literals in the initialization, then you must copy the elements yourself:

BookType book = { 0 }; // 0 initalize
strncpy( book.title, title, sizeof(book.title)-1 );   
strncpy( book.author, author, sizeof(book.author)-1 );