Thread: Pointer related problem

The following function readline() is used to read the lines from console and store the pointers to each line into the *lineptr[MAXLINES].

Code:

#define MAXLINES 5000
#define MAXLEN    1000

int getline(char *line, int maxlen);
int readlines(char *lineptr[], int maxlines);

char *lineptr[MAXLINES];

int readlines(char *lineptr[], int maxlines)
{
  int len, nlines;
  char *p, line[MAXLEN];
  
  nlines=0;
  while((len=getline(line, MAXLEN)>0)
     if(nlines>=maxlines ||(p=(char *)malloc(len))==NULL)
       return -1;
     else 
     {
       lines[len-1]='\0';/*delete newline*/
       strcpy(p, line);
       lineptr[nlines++]=p;
     }
     return nlines;
}

How can we write this function using only the *lineptr[] but not using the malloc to maintain storage?

You could use a fixed length array of strings, which is just a char matrix.

Code:

char lineptr[MAXLINES][MAXLEN] = { "", "example foo", "example bar" };

You're free to do whatever you like initialization wise: I just wanted to demonstrate the workings of the data structure.

You will have to change the type of the lineptr parameter for this to work and reduce the memory request. 5000 lines * 1000 bytes is 4.7 megabytes, which is too big for the stack, generally.