Thread: warning: return makes integer from pointer without a cast

Notice that you declared dbValue as returning a char, but you returned a, which is declared as a pointer to char.

By the way, note that fflush(stdin) results in undefined behaviour, though it may discard what is in the standard input stream on some implementations.

Now a is a char, but strcpy returns a pointer to char, yet you are assigning the return value of strcpy to a.

Why is the significance of the return value of dbValue anyway?

Assuming you now have something like this, you have another problem.

Code:

char *dbValue(char *codeValue)
{
    t_asrepdb r_asrepdb;
    t_asrepdb c_asrepdb;
    char a;
    int search_code;
        search_code = search_dataCode(codeValue, &r_asrepdb);
        if (search_code == -1)
    {
         
        }
    fgets(c_asrepdb.value, 201, stdin);
    a = strcpy(r_asrepdb.value, c_asrepdb.value);
    return a;
}

Firstly, the fgets line should read something like

Code:

if ( fgets(c_asrepdb.value, sizeof(c_asrepdb.value), stdin) ) {
  // success
}

1. Always test the return result of file operations.
2. Never use magic numbers to indicate the size of buffers. Always use a sizeof(), or the #define constant.

The return result of strcpy is the pointer you passed to the destination for the copy - namely r_asrepdb.value.
But r_asrepdb.value is just a local variable.
So when the function returns, the local variable no longer exists, and the pointer to the local variable is now an invalid pointer.

This will cause you problems.

The way out is to do something like

Code:

char *dbValue(char *codeValue, char *answer, size_t maxAnswerLen) {
}

In other words, you store the output string in answer, making sure to write no more than maxAnswerLen bytes to answer.

Originally Posted by ddutch

In your first code you had char *a which got its value from a call to strcpy() and at the end dbvalue() returns the value of a. So you should have changed the type of dbvalue() into char pointer.

That would fix the type errors, but as ariasukma observed, it is not necessarily a correct fix to the overall problem because the pointer cannot point to a non-static local variable otherwise the caller might use a pointer to an object that no longer exists, but we see that the strcpy call involves r_asrepdb and c_asrepdb, both of which are non-static local to the function.