Thread: Help with C Arrays

Im trying to write a program that breaks down a large array into smaller arrays. For the example i'm posting, I made a 4int array to be brokend into 2 2-int arrays.

Whenever I run my function to fill the two arrays, it always fills the first array just fine, but then rewrites the first array with the second two integers instead of storing them in the second array.

Why is the fill_array function not using the address of the second array?

Code:

#include <stdio.h>


void fill_ary(int ary_s[], int ary_d[], int cnt);
void print_small_ary(int sary[]);




int main(void){
    setbuf(stdout, NULL);


    int original_ary[4] = {1,2,3,4};


    int small_ary_a[2] = {0};


    int small_ary_b[2] = {0};


    fill_ary(original_ary, small_ary_a, 0);
    fill_ary(original_ary, small_ary_b, 2);


    print_small_ary(small_ary_a);
    print_small_ary(small_ary_b);


}


void fill_ary(int ary_s[], int ary_d[], int cnt){
    int i;
    for(i = cnt;i<cnt+2;i++)
        ary_d[i] = ary_s[i];
}


void print_small_ary(int sary[]){
    int i;
    i = 0;
    for(i=0;i<2;i++)
        printf(" %i", sary[i]);
    printf("\n");
    return;
}

Output:
3 4
0 0

Originally Posted by laserlight

The problem is that when you write to ary_d, you must start from index 0, whereas when you read from ary_s, you must start from index cnt. Unfortunately, you start from index cnt in both cases, hence when cnt is greater than 0, you end up writing to the destination array out of bounds.

I suggest that you have 5 parameters:

• const int source[]
• int dest[]
• int source_start
• int source_end (or source_count)
• int dest_size

This will allow you to write a "copy from source array starting at some index to fill destination array" function while avoiding array out of bounds accesses.

That worked great - Thank you so much for the explanation!