char pointer to pointer question

Hi everyone,

I've been playing around with pointer to pointers recently and stumbled upon a weird problem I can't figure out.

Code:

Code:

---

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main ()
{
        char **test;
        char *str1 = "string 1";
        char *str2 = "string 2";
        char *str3 = "string 3";
        int i = 0;

        test = malloc(3 * sizeof(char *));

        test[0] = str1;
        test[1] = str2;
        test[2] = str3;

        while (*test++) {
                printf("%d\n",i);
                ++i;
        }

        return 0;
}

---

Compiling with "gcc -O2 -Wall -pedantic -ansi -g test.c -o test" which results in:

0
1
2
3

Even though there are only 3 char pointers assigned, shouldn't it stop if i == 2 ?
Changing the malloc to malloc(4 * sizeof(char *)) seems to be fixing the problem, but that can't be right, making room for four char pointers but only using three?

Also if I'm assigning one, two, four or more char pointers to test it counts correctly. It only fails when assigning 3 pointers to test.

Can someone please point out to me what I'm missing here?

salt shaker

This won't even compile. Show us the version you were able to compile with.

The problem is that you loop until *test is a null pointer, but the test array has no null pointers, hence you access the array out of bounds, resulting in undefined behaviour. Allocating space for 4 pointers happens to work probably because the fourth pointer is incidentally a null pointer, but more accurately:

Code:

---

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stddef.h>

int main()
{
    const char **test;
    const char *str1 = "string 1";
    const char *str2 = "string 2";
    const char *str3 = "string 3";
    int i = 0;

    test = malloc(4 * sizeof(char *));
    if (test) {
        test[0] = str1;
        test[1] = str2;
        test[2] = str3;
        test[3] = NULL;

        while (*test++) {
            printf("%d\n", i);
            ++i;
        }

        free(test);
    } else {
        printf("Unable to allocate memory.\n");
    }

    return 0;
}

---

Notice that I assign NULL to test[3], hence the loop surely works. I also include <stdio.h> and <stddef.h> for printf and NULL respectively. I deal with const char* instead of char* since the program deals with string literals, and string literals must not be modified. I also used free() when test is no longer to be used, and checked the return value of malloc().

Thanks laserlight :)