Help please!

[Trapped]

hi,
I need some help on the following issue.

how should I declare a C function to return
"char *temp[] "

I tried to use char **, unfortunately it does not work.

basically, I want to achieve this. suppose temp = {"abc", "de","2"}

I want a function to be able to return a pointer so that I could
achieve "abc", "de", "2" one by one.

thanks

[Sorensen]

You could do something like -

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

char** foo()
{
	char** arr= malloc(sizeof(char*)*3);
	arr[0]="abc";
	arr[1]="de";
	arr[2]="2";
	return arr;
}

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{ 
	char** arr = foo();
	printf("%s %s %s",arr[0],arr[1],arr[2]);  
	free(arr);
	
    return 0;
}

However, you'd be better off allocating the memory before the function call and passing the pointer in as a parameter, so you don't forget that you need to free the memory. An alternative would be to create a struct of three char pointers, initialise each pointer to a literal in the function, and return the struct. This would remove the need for memory management.

Also it probably wont work if you need to modify the strings.