Thread: Completely baffled

So I thought a while back I had away of returning an array from a function by returning a pointer and then using *(ptr + n) where n is 1, 2, 3 etc. to get the elements out. I seem to recall this working but at the moment it isn't, and I can't figure out why it does this. Here is the code I have:

Code:

double *final_ptr = box(data, width, range);    
printf("final pointer = %f\n", *final_ptr);  
double final_array[5] = { 0 };
final_array[0] = *final_ptr;
printf("final array : %f\n", final_array[0]);

Which was mostly some test code I put in to try to pin down why this wasn't working. The weird thing is it prints:

final pointer = 1.5 (what I wanted)
final array : 0

I do not understand why. But this doesn't happen if you write a = 6; b = a, and then print a and b. So I imagine that it is either something to do with using a pointer or else something to do with the function "box" I have written. But the "box" function returns the result I want, and that seems to carry over to the main function. It is just when I want to put it into an array it does not seem to work. Is there some rule that I am unaware of here?

Any help is much appreciated, thanks.

Edit: I have also just tried putting just a standard double and making it equal to *final_ptr. This also then prints 0. So it seems that, apart from the actual pointer, everything thinks that it is pointing to 0. As you can tell I'm not exactly an expert in C but this seems really weird to me.

Ah, thank you very much for clearing that up. With regard to using function parameters to edit arrays, could you give me a quick example of how that is used? For example if I wanted to do a really simple function that just added 1 to each element of the array, how would I go about doing that? Is it as simple as just:

Code:

int *function(int *number)
{
  //loop through and add one to all the elements
  return(number)
}

Thanks for all your help.

Originally Posted by whiteflags

Returning an array from a function is the same as returning a pointer to a local variable from a function which is undefined behavior.

A minor correction: the act of returning a pointer to a local variable does not cause undefined behaviour. Undefined behaviour occurs if the caller subsequently dereferences that pointer.

It is the impact on the caller (after all, given a pointer, a likely use case is to dereference it) that makes returning the address of a local/auto variable a bad idea.

Good point. If one was simply to compare it to NULL only, then that should be fine.
Of course nobody is saying that it is the least bit good to do.