Question

I’m working with linked lists for my first time and have to create a function that can insert a node at the end of a doubly linked list. So far I have

void LinkedList::insertAtTail(const value_type& entry) {
    Node *newNode = new Node(entry, NULL, tail);
    tail->next = newNode;
    tail = newNode;
    ++node_count;
}

The Node class accepts a value to be stored, a value for the next pointer to point to, and a value for the previous pointer in that order. Whenever I try to insert a node here, I get an error saying there was an unhandled exception and there was an access violation in writing to location 0x00000008.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going wrong here but I assume it has something to do with dereferencing a null pointer based on the error message. I would really appreciate some help with solving this problem.

EDIT:

I should have clarified early, tail is a pointer that points to the last node in the list. Tail->next accesses the next variable of that last node which, before the function runs, points to NULL but after it executes should point to the new node created.

Answer 1

Where does tail point to initially? If it’s NULL then you’ll dereference a null pointer when trying to insert the first element.

Does it help if you test tail before dereferencing it?

void LinkedList::insertAtTail(const value_type& entry) {
    Node *newNode = new Node(entry, NULL, tail);
    if (tail)
        tail->next = newNode;
    tail = newNode;
    ++node_count;
}

If tail is null and offsetof(Node, next) is 8 that would explain the access violation, because tail->next would be at the address 0x00000000 + 8 which is 0x00000008, so assigning to tail->next would try to write to memory at that address, which is exactly the error you’re seeing.