Thread: Passing array to another function

Originally Posted by RyanC

is it enough to just pass the pointer of it "arr1" ?

Maybe. Generally, you should also pick one:

• Pass a length/size argument.
• Pass another pointer to one-past-the-end of the array/range.
• Have a known constant size for the array.
• Designate a sentinel value to denote the end of the elements of the array that are in use.

The first two tend to be safe and yet flexible. The third tends to be safe, but inflexible. The fourth can be safe if carefully handled, but the decades of buffer overflow vulnerabilities with null-terminated strings indicates that it may be a rather optimistic proposition.

Originally Posted by RyanC

more over I'm curious if I could also pass instead of "arr1" , "arr1+3" then the other function gets as input pointer "arr1+3" .. can I then inside the other function do any manipulation on array "arr1" starting from arr1 and not from arr1+3?

Yes, but that would be poor practice since the function wouldn't know that there are three elements before the element that that pointer points to (unless it is designed to iterate in reverse, or something like that). Therefore, trying to do that sort of thing is likely to be error-prone: you could end up trying to access an element that doesn't exist.