Thread: char pointers

Hello All,

I've been working on a program which writes to MySQL. It needs some variables posting into the database and I'm having trouble elegantly constructing a char * string to send to the MySQL connector.

Here's what I'm doing at present, apologies for my awful code, it works but seems unnecessarily long-winded and ugly. Does anyone know of a more elegant way to insert variables into a char * string? If there were a need for lots of SQL queries this method could get ugly very quickly!

Code:

char *arg1a = "select * from database where field1 = '";
char *arg1b = "' and field2 = '";
char *arg1c = "'";

char *sqlarg;

sqlarg = (char *)malloc((strlen(variable1) + strlen(variable2) + strlen(arg1a) + strlen(arg1b) + strlen(arg1c) + 1)

*sizeof(char));

strcpy(arg1, arg1a);
strcat(arg1, variable1);
strcat(arg1, arg1b);
strcat(arg1, variable2);
strcat(arg1, arg1c);

/* completed query now stored in sqlarg */

Thanks for any pointers (heehee)

Thanks, Salem. That code threw up some scary errors which I'm not experienced enough to figure out, but you did put me on the right track, and this seems to have got me going:

Code:

sprintf(query, "insert into database values ('%s', '%s')", field1, field2);

I read someplace this could be bad, but the snprintf manpage is, frankly, beyond my grasp at this point.