Thread: Return a pointer to a struct that is in an array of structs?

I have a struct:

Code:

struct room
{
char name[32];
char type[32];
int numConnections;
}

I have an array of these structs:

Code:

struct room rooms[7];

I am trying to create a function that returns a pointer to the struct that has the same name as what was passed into the function.

Code:

struct room *getRoomByName(const char* name)
{
struct room *current;
for (int i = 0; i < 7; i++)
{
if ((strcmp(rooms[i].name, name) == 0))
{
*current = rooms[i];
}
}
return current;
}

*accidently hardcoded the name in that strcmp()

I pretty much have no idea what I'm doing.

Your basic loop idea looks alright, but you need to pass the array of rooms and also avoid hardcoding the size, e.g.,

Code:

struct room *getRoomByName(struct room rooms[], size_t num_rooms, const char* name)
{
    struct room *current;
    for (size_t i = 0; i < num_rooms; i++)
    {
        if (strcmp(rooms[i].name, "roomname") == 0)
        {
            *current = rooms[i];
        }
    }
    return current;
}

Of course, the above is still not correct:

• You have the name parameter, so you should use that instead of hardcoding the room name.
• current is a pointer; it does not point to any object. Therefore, you cannot dereference it with *current. But that's not a problem because you want current to point to rooms[i], i.e., assign the address of rooms[i] to current.
• What happens if no room with the given room name is found? It would be good to initialise current to be a null pointer so that the caller can check for a null pointer and hence determine if there was a room with the given room name.

Although unlikely to be a matter of correctness, if you assume that the room names are unique, or if you want the first matching room, then you should break after assigning to current.