Thread: list of questions

I've a list of questions regarding pointers and strings. I was doing K&R section 5.8. In the section a function month_name is given which returns name of the month when number of the month is passed as an argument. Here is the code I made from the function.

Code:

#include<stdio.h>
char *month_name(int);
int main(void)
{
	int n;
	printf("Enter");
	scanf("%d",&n);
	printf("%s",month_name(n));
}
char *month_name(int n)
{
	char *name[]={"illegal month","jan","feb","march","april","may","june",
		"july","august","september","oct","nov","dec"};
	return (n<1||n>12)?name[0]:name[n];
}

Now my questions are:
1. Is name a one-dimensional or two dimensional array? This is what K&R have written

Since the size of the array name is not specified, the compiler counts the initializers and fills in the correct number.

What will the compiler fill with: 13 or something else?

2. Another quote from K&R in the same section

This is an ideal application for an internal static array.

Why is this an ideal application of static. I did the program without static and it runs fine?

3. Although the program didn't give any errors it gave a warning

Code:

Warning	1	warning C4996: 'scanf' was declared deprecated

What's wrong with the compiler?
4. I'm fed up of asking this question and now feel awkward to ask it but what is the difference between
char *s
char s[10]
I'm not able to visualize the storage of s in the former one. I've checked it in many sites but still I'm not able to get it.
Thanks for reading this huge post.

1. 13

2. static (and const!) would be suitable here. The "static" would tell the compiler to make it a "local global", meaning that the name array is initialized at load-time, rather than each time the function is called.

3. What's wrong is that you are using MS compiler. It is a good compiler, but they have strange ideas about how to make it safe....

4. char *s is a (usually 4 bytes in typical machines today) storage space for a pointer. There is no defined space to store anything other than the address of some memory. You can do

Code:

s = "abc"

, but you can't use

Code:

strcpy(s, "abc");

without first giving s a memory location to store the string into.
On the other hand char s[10] is space for 10 characters (or 9 characters, plus the terminating zero if we are talking about about C style strings).
Edit: In the latter case, you can do:

Code:

strcpy(s, "abc");

but not:

Code:

s = "abc";

since s is an array, and there is no fundamentals in C to copy arrays.

--
Mats

Originally Posted by nonoob

3. Project -> <program name> Properties

Configuration Properties -> C/C++ -> Preprocessor -> Preprocessor Definitions

You will see the following
WIN32;NDEBUG;_CONSOLE

You need to add:
_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE

Thanks nonoob for this one. Now the warning has gone.