Question

I want to create an array of structures:

typedef struct
{
   int id;
   int department;
}employee;

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
 int i;
 employee job[3];   ////////////////error
 for (i=0;i<3;i++)
 {
    //do something
 }  
return 0;
}

the issue is that when I want to compile I got the following error:

syntax error before ‘;’ token and points to the line that I marked

Any help?

Thanks

Answer 1

That code, as it stands alone, is fine, as per the following transcript:

pax> cat qq.c
typedef struct {
   int id;
   int department;
} employee;

int main (int argc, char *argv[]) {
    int i;
    employee job[3];   ////////////////error
    for (i=0;i<3;i++) {
        //do something
    }  
   return 0;
}
pax> gcc -o qq qq.c
pax> 

. Some things you may want to check are:

• Has anything #defined something like employee or job?
• Are you sure employee is spelt identically in both places?
• Are you sure you have all those semicolons you claim to have?
• Are there any “funny” characters in your code (ones that seem invisible but still stuff up your input stream to the compiler)?

A good first start would be to comment out the errant line and see if you get the error on the following line. That should narrow it down to either that line (no error) or a previous line (still have error).

You can see the entire file in hex mode (looking for funny characters) if you do something like:

od -xcb myfile.c

(under Linux – Windows I’m not sure though, if you have gvim, you can convert it to hex with a menu item).