Thread: 2D arrays with functions made easy

hi folks,

i thought i should share something with people who find it difficult to work with 2D arrays using functions. Notice the following :

#include<stdio.h>

void dosomething(char (*virtualarray) [11])
{
...
/* anything you want to do to virtualarray */
...
return;
}


main()
{
char mainarray[11][11];

...

dosomething(mainarray);

...
return 0;
}


anything you do to virtualarray in dosomething gets reflected in mainarray in function main().

In dosomething, you can have random access by
virtualarray[i] [j] which points to the jth element of ith row

Alternatively, you can use (*virtualarray) [j] pointing to the jth element of whichever row virtualarray is initialised to (which is the first row when you enter dosomething). you can increment virtualarray to point to the next row if you need sequential access. To beginners, i would say... use the previous method incrementing 'i' each time to move on to the next row. Using the second method can really bug you if not done properly. I myself ran into trouble trying it out

Actually i m still in the process of figuring out how this works cause i saw it in a solved example in a book. Suggestions please ...

Regards,
Goran.

It's actually much much simpler than that - if you take the approach of writing slightly redundant declarations. It saves worrying when to use the (), and how to remove the correct [] term from the array. In essense, it just becomes a cut/paste of the declaration of the n-dimensional array you want to pass as a parameter.

If you have
&nbsp; char mainarray[11][11];

The function prototype can be written as
&nbsp; void dosomething ( char array[11] [11] );
Because it is equivalent to
&nbsp; void dosomething ( char array[] [11] );
or
&nbsp; void dosomething ( char (*array) [11] );

And the function declaration as

Code:

void dosomething ( char array[11][11] ) {
    int i, j;
    for ( i = 0 ; i < 11 ; i++ ) {
        for ( j = 0 ; j < 11 ; j++ ) {
             array[i][j] = 0;
        }
    }
}

The array[i][j] you use in the function is exactly the same method you would use if you were directly accessing the array in main - because that is all you are doing - accessing the array in main.