Question

I have a very basic doubt. Say I declare a pointer to a string.

char *data;

and allocate memory as follows

data = malloc(13*sizeof(char));

My question is how do I initialize the string.
Is

data = NULL;

the right thing to do.

Thanks

Answer 1

If by initialize you mean make it all zeroes, then:

memset(data, 0, 13);

Will do it.

Or, as @Griffin said, using calloc instead of malloc to allocate and initialize the area at the same time.