Thread: Help with returning an array

Originally Posted by vart

this does not fixes the main problem - you cannot return pointer to local var.

But in this case the return value is assigned to a local variable in main. Wouldn't that solve the problem, like this?

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
char *st();

int main()
{
        char *s = st();
        puts(s);
        puts(st());

        return 0;
}
char *st(){
        char *s = "There!";
        return s;
}

No, in that example you are returning a pointer to a string literal. The string literal is in read only memory and will not be overwritten by anything.

In your previous example you are returning a pointer to a local variable. This could be overwritten on other adjacent function calls and is probably undefined or implementation specific.

As vart said, you should use malloc to create your array on the heap or you can supply the function with the variable and fill it then.