Question

I’m trying without success to copy a char array to another one. I have tried memcpy copying direcly the address from one to another, like this:

void include(int id, char name[16]) {
int i;

  for (i = 0; i < SZ; i++) {
      if (a[i].id == 0) {
          a[i].id = id;
          memcpy(&a[i].name, &name, strlen(name)+1);
          return;
      }
  }
}

But obviously works only inside of this function. I have tried also like this: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstring/memcpy/ but it didn’t work.
Can someone help me?

Answer 1

Drop the & from &name and it should work. Your function declaration is misleading; it’s actually equivalent to:

void include(int id, char *name)

The compiler pretends that the array
parameter was declared as a pointer

If name would be an array, name == &name. But name is a pointer so name != &name.

The C FAQ has some questions that might help:

• Array parameters
• Array parameter size