Question

I’m simulating inheritance in C, but I’m not so familiar with the language. Below is some of the code. Visual Studio has an error message for emp.name=n which says:

expression must be a modifiable lvalue.

How do I change it so it can be modified?

typedef struct {    
        char name[20]; 
        double salary;  
        } Employee;

Employee newEmployee(char n[], double s)
{
    Employee emp;
    emp.name=n;
    emp.salary=s;
    return emp;
}

Answer 1

You need to copy the data from n to Employee.name:

strncpy(emp.name, n, 20);

However, if n is not NULL-terminated, you will run into problems. Use the following code to guarantee that emp.name will be a NULL-terminated string:

strncpy(emp.name, n, 19);
emp.name[19] = '\0';