Question

Is there a way to declare first and then initialize an array in C?

So far I have been initializing an array like this:

int myArray[SIZE] = {1,2,3,4....};

But I need to do something like this

int myArray[SIZE];

myArray = {1,2,3,4....};

Answer 1

In C99 you can do it using a compound literal in combination with memcpy

memcpy(myarray, (int[]) { 1, 2, 3, 4 }, sizeof myarray);

(assuming that the size of the source and the size of the target is the same).

In C89/90 you can emulate that by declaring an additional “source” array

const int SOURCE[SIZE] = { 1, 2, 3, 4 }; /* maybe `static`? */
int myArray[SIZE];
...
memcpy(myarray, SOURCE, sizeof myarray);