Question

In my sample program I get “corruption of heap” error at the following line.

ofstream filePossibleHaplotype;

“Windows has triggered a breakpoint in Project_Name.exe.
This may be due to a corruption of the heap, which indicates a bug in Project_Name.exe or any of the DLLs it has loaded.”

How does declaration of a file stream object cause this error ?

[EDIT – Added few snippets of code]
SET = 1
NOT_SET = 0
LENGTH = 5

void fill_Unique_Bit_Array()
    {
        int zeroFlag = NOT_SET;
        int oneFlag = NOT_SET;
        bit_array = new int(LENGTH);
        for(int i =0; i<LENGTH; i++)
        {
            for(int j =0; j<NUMBER_OF_READS; j++)
            {
                if(readMartixArray[j][i] == '0')
                    zeroFlag = SET;
                else if (readMartixArray[j][i] == '1')
                    oneFlag = SET;
            }
            if(zeroFlag==SET && oneFlag==SET)
                bit_array[i] = SET + SET;
            else if(zeroFlag==SET && oneFlag==NOT_SET)
                bit_array[i] = NOT_SET;
            else if(zeroFlag==NOT_SET && oneFlag==SET)
                bit_array[i] = SET;
            zeroFlag = NOT_SET;
            oneFlag = NOT_SET;
        }
        reverse_bit_array = array_Reverse(bit_array, LENGTH);        
    }

This function calls,

void find_all_possible_combinations(int ,int, int, int )
    {
        ofstream filePossibleHaplotype;
    }

which leads to crash of heap memory.

Answer 1

The issue was with dynamic memory allocation of bit_array. I created a normal static array and the code worked fine. But I am not sure of why the dynamic array allocation is causing an issue.I have declared the int pointer as a global variable.

bit_array = new int(LENGTH);