Question

wordCur is a string of capital letters, and dictionary is an array of strings, no matter what I input into wordCur, I am always returned 0.

Edit: I updated the code a little bit, and added an abridged version of the rest of the program for some context. As it is shown here, it just crashes when it gets to checkValid

int main() {
    FILE *ifp;
    ifp = fopen("dictionary.txt", "r");
    int* lDist[26];
    int* lUsed[26];
    int dictLen;
    int i;
    fscanf(ifp, "%d", &dictLen);
    char dictionary[dictLen][7];
    char* letters[7];
    int scoreCur = 0;
    int scoreHi = 0;
    char wordCur[7];
    char wordHi[7];
    int isWord = 0;





//reads the dictionary into the array
for (i = 0; i < dictLen; i++) {
    fscanf(ifp, "%s", &dictionary[i]);
}
    scanf("%s", wordCur);
    isWord = checkValid(wordCur, dictLen, dictionary);
    if (isWord == 1) {
        scoreCur = calcScore(wordCur);
    }



//fclose(ifp); not sure why, but this causes a crash
return 0;
}


int checkValid (char *wordCur,int dictLen, char dictionary[dictLen]) {
    int valid = 0;
    int i;

    for (i = 0; i < dictLen; i++){
    int helper = strcmp(wordCur, dictionary[i]);
    if (helper = 0){
        valid = 1;
    }
}

Answer 1

Your code should probably look more like this:

int checkValid(const char *wordCur,       // word to search for (string)
               int dictLen,               // no of entries in dictionary
               char dictionary[][7])      // dictionary (array of strings)
{
    int valid = 0;
    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < dictLen; i++)
    {
        if (strcmp(wordCur, dictionary[i]) == 0)
        {
            valid = 1;
            break;
        }
    }
    return valid;
}