Question

I’m a beginner and i need to ask a question..
I wrote this small code that accepts a string from the user and prints it..very simple.

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
   int i;
   char *p = new char[1];

   for(i = 0 ; *(p+i) ; i++) 
     *(p+i) = getchar();

   *(p+i) = 0;

   for(i = 0 ; *(p+i) ; i++) 
     putchar(*(p+i));

   return 0;
}

when i enter any string..like “stack overflow” for example..it will print “sta” and drop the rest of the string. I know it’s an easy one to solve but since I’ve just started i can’t understand what’s wrong here . Thanks in advance .

Answer 1

There are several problems with this code. First, you have a buffer overflow, because char *p = new char[1] allocates only one character for storage. This is exceeded when i > 0. Next, your first loop will keep going until it reaches a point in unallocated memory (undefined behavior) that has a value of zero. This just happens to be after the third value in your case. You probably wanted something more like *(p+i-1) == 0 to give “the last character read meets some condition.” Finally, you’re allocating memory with new[] and not properly deallocating it with a matching delete[].

Consider using std::cin and std::string for much safer and correct code:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

int main(int, char**) {
   std::string s;

   std::cout << "Enter a string: ";
   std::cin >> s;

   std::cout << s << std::endl;
}