Question

I’m creating the following buffer:

char *buffer;
int buffer_size = 1024;
buffer = (char*) ( malloc(buffer_size * sizeof(char) );

Then when I do:

int actual_size = sizeof(buffer);
printf("Size: %d", actual_size);

What it prints is:

size: 4

While I would expect it to be 1024, why is this?

Answer 1

This does not work like that

 sizeof(buffer);

returns the size of buffer which is a pointer, not an array. If you have an array such as the following

 char szArray[100];

then

 sizeof(szArray);

would return 100 because szArray is an array, but a pointer is not an array.