Question

My application is crashing when I try printing the buffer. Otherwise, it works fine.
This is the code:

irc.h

  class IRC
            {
              public:
                      void sockconnect(char * hName, int portNum);
                          void sockwrite(char* sendbuf);
                          char sockread(void);
                          bool connected;
                  private:
                          WSADATA wsaData;
                          SOCKET m_socket;
                          sockaddr_in clientService;
                          LPHOSTENT hostEntry;

};

irc.cc

char IRC::sockread(void)

  {
    int result;
    char buffer[DEFAULT_BUFLEN];
        result = recv(m_socket, buffer, DEFAULT_BUFLEN, 0);

        if (result > 0) {
             return *buffer;
              }
          else if (result == 0)
              {
             connected = false;
                 return *buffer;
              }
          else {
         printf("recv failed with error: %d\n", WSAGetLastError());
         return *buffer;
        }

   }

main.cc

 IRC client;

 while (client.connected == true) {
     char buffer = client.sockread();
         if (buffer == NULL)
           break;


        printf ("Buffer: %s\n",buffer);
       }

Answer 1

If you want to print the first character use

printf ("Buffer: %c\n",buffer);

If you want to print the whole then sockread should return the whole buffer, not the first character. For that you will need to return the address of the first element of the buffer which in this case should already be dynamically allocated.

printf ("Buffer: %s\n",buffer);

Edit After thinking I think you want the latter for that change the sockread() function in the following way:

• change the return type from char to char* or better const char*
• char buffer[DEFAULT_BUFLEN]; to char* buffer = new char[DEFAULT_BUFLEN];
• return *buffer to return buffer

Also, in this case don’t forget to delete the buffer

const char* buffer = client.sockread(); //not char buffer as in your code
printf ("Buffer: %s\n",buffer);
delete [] buffer;

hth