Question

I’m new to c++. I just want to declare an array and find its size. How do I do this? I keep getting a character count or something.

string vidArray[] = {"fingers.mov","motion_test.mov"};
int numVids = vidArray->size();

Answer 1

First of all the vidArray->size() call you made is equivalent to vidArray[0].call() because an array is nothing else than a pointer pointing the first element, so by calling vidArray->size() you are simply doing : (*vidArray).size().

Such old arrays doesn’t have a size(), there are however unadvisable hacks based on macros to get the count of an array :

#define COUNTOF(arr) (sizeof(arr) / sizeof(arr[0]))
COUNTOF(vidArray)

This will return you the array size, but this isn’t a great thing (Explanations), that’s why I would advise you to use an std::vector if you need dynamic resizing :

std::vector<std::string> vid;
vid.push_back("fingers.mov");
vid.push_back("motion_test.mov");

size_t vidSize = vid.size();

That you can also initialize this way with boost::assign (Documentation)

std::vector<std::string> vid;
vid += std::string("fingers.mov"),std::string("motion_test.mov");

Or a boost::array (Documentation) if you want an array which cannot vary in size (i.e. As stated by Walter in the comments, if you are already using c++11 you can use std::array which is boost::array but in the standard library)

boost::array<std::string,2> vid = {std::string("fingers.mov"),std::string("motion_test.mov")};

size_t vidSize = vid.size();