Thread: C assign value to char pointer in struct

Hi,

I'm having a problem assigning a value to a pointer in one of my structs

This is the struct definition

Code:

typedef struct student *student_ptr;
struct student
{
	int ID;
	char *name;
};

typedef struct node *node_ptr;
struct node
{
	char code[7];
	char *name;
	int n_students;
	struct student students[1000];
	node_ptr next;
};

Here is the code using it:

Code:

		
char name;

scanf("%s",&name);

node->students[n].name = &name;

where students is an array of student structs inside the node.

The problem is that assigning name to node->students[n].name works fine, but when I call the function again to do the same thing to another student in the students array, both students have the exact same name.
I have tried to scanf directly into node->students[n].name but it does not appear to scan, nor does strcpy work.

I'm pretty sure that the char* in the student definition is always pointing to &name which causes all of those pointers to point to one variable. Is there a way to make each char pointer of each student point to an individual local &name?

Any help would be much appreciated

Code:

char name;

scanf("%s",&name);

node->students[n].name = &name;

I'm surprised that doesn't segfault... you'll be stuffing however many characters you get into `name', which is a variable that can hold a single char... bound to be bad. Also, strcpy() won't work, because you need to have allocated the memory for the source, which presumably you're making the same as the destination, so it will just copy it into the same buffer, effectively doing nothing.

Honestly, you might want to look a bit more into C and its string handling - are you coming from a language that does the memory management for you?

Anyway, what you're safest doing is using fgets() to put input into a buffer. Put it into a static buffer in your function, then strdup() it:

Code:

char buf[128];
char *ret = fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), stdin);
if (ret == NULL)
    /* deal with error */
else
    node->students[n].name = strdup(buf);

Originally Posted by mothermole1

The compiler has an error with the code you provided:

Code:

Implicit declaration of function strdup

and

Code:

Assignment make pointer from integer without cast

Ah, I thought strdup() was a C standard function - turns out it's a POSIX/BSD function. You can easily implement it with something like:

Code:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

char *strdup(const char *str)
{
    char *new_str = malloc(strlen(str) + 1);
    if (new_str)
        strcpy(new_str, str);
    return new_str;
}

Yes.

Code:

#define MAX_NAME 50
struct student
{
	int ID;
	char name[MAX_NAME + 1]
};
scanf("%s", node->students[n].name); /* be sure to limit the input to length MAX_NAME somehow */