Question

Ok, this is a C programming homework question. But I’m truly stuck.

I ask the user to input words, and then I insert the input into an array, but I can’t have any control over the number of words the user types.

I guess what I’m asking is how do you declare a an array in C without declaring its length and without asking the user what the length should be.

I know this has something to do with malloc, but if you could give me some examples of how to do this, I would really appreciate it.

Answer 1

You can realloc it every time like:

int size = 0;
char **array = malloc(0);
while(/* something */)
{
    char *string = // get input
    size++;
    array = realloc(array, size * sizeof(char*));
    array[size - 1] = string;
}

Or in chunks if you care about speed.