Question

I want to initialize all elements of:

char buffer[1000][1000];

to ' '.

I’ve tried

char buffer[1000][1000] = { ' ' };

and

char buffer[1000][1000] = { { ' ' } };

but both ways only seem to initialize only the first term.

I am willing to consider alternative approaches that get the job done, but I would prefer to avoid writing in this kind of initialization code in main, or even a separate initialization method.

Answer 1

memset(buffer, ' ', sizeof buffer);

If the array has automatic storage duration, consider heap-allocation to avoid overflowing the stack.

If the array has static storage duration, you’ll still need to initialize the array at runtime as there’s no way to initialize elements with a non-zero value without providing a separate initialization value for each of them.