Thread: Dynamic array?

Yes, e.g., with malloc, realloc and free.

Telnet addresses are just IPv4 addresses, right? I'd go with a struct to hold an IPv4 address, then you could write:

Code:

struct addr *addresses = malloc(sizeof(addresses[0]) * N);

where N is the initial number of elements. You can figure out how to realloc and free by searching online.

Originally Posted by ignatius333

I should have also mentioned that, "array.txt" is actually an #include file in my code.

Yes, you should have mentioned this from the start. I assumed that by "external array" you meant the content of the array was loaded from an external file, whereas what you seem to have done was to literally define a C fixed size array in an external file, and then name it "array.txt" when in reality it is a C header file, not a generic text file.

Unfortunately, you have to redo that part of your code because your approach is simply wrong: with your current approach, you must always recompile whenever you add a new element to the array. There is no way around it short of a code redo.

So, to redo:

• Remove the #include of array.txt
• Change the format of array.txt to something easier to parse, e.g., one IP address on each line, nothing else.
• Adapt what I showed you to create a dynamic array.
• Write code to read from array.txt and populate the dynamic array. There are a few ways to do this, but one way is to have two size_t variables: size and capacity. size would track the number of elements of the dynamic array that are in use, and capacity would track the number of elements of the dyanamic array that have been allocated. You start with size == 0 and capacity == 5 (or some other suitably small non-zero number), then whenever the size is about to exceed capacity (i.e., you have read the next IP address, but size == capacity), you realloc the capacity by some factor (e.g., doubling it with a factor of 2).

This way, when you change array.txt (I'd suggest renaming it to something more meaningful), you just need to run your program and it will load the current content to the dynamic array.