Thread: New to Structures; compilation error

Hi all,
I'm a novice C programmer and am trying to write a program that reads in a file (which describes menus shown on a certain application). Eventually I'll make the program write out a report of the contents. At the moment I'm not very au fait with structures and I'm getting the compilation error
"Type mismatch in parameter '__dest' in call to strcpy".

I'll post the code below. Many thanks for any help/advice.

Code:

 main()
  {
   char buf1[5479];
   char menubuf[5479];
   int comp01;

 struct  menuDetail {
	char MenuDes0[25];
	char  filler01[06];
        char MenuNam0[06];
	char  filler02[02];
        char MenuTyp0[01];
	char  filler03[04];
        char  MenuSec0[02];
	char filler04[452];
	char MenuDes1[25];
<snip>
        char MenuDes10[25];
	char  filler41[06];
        char MenuNam10[06];
	char  filler42[02];
        char MenuTyp10[01];
	char  filler43[04];
        char  MenuSec10[02];
	char filler44[452];
};

struct menuDetail *menuRec;

   FILE *fpin1, *fpout2;

   if ((fpin1=fopen("bm7000.men","r"))==NULL)
    {
     printf("Error input file \n");
     exit (1);
    }
   if ((fpout2=fopen("menulst.txt","w"))==NULL)
    {
     printf("Error output file \n");
     exit (1);
    }
  
   while (fgets(buf1,5478,fpin1)!= NULL)
  {
    strcpy(*menuRec,buf1);    ***   ERROR ON THIS LINE   ***
    strncpy((*menuRec).MenuDes0,&menubuf[0],25);
    (*menuRec).MenuDes0[26]='\0';
    strncpy((*menuRec).MenuNam0,&menubuf[32],06);
    (*menuRec).MenuNam0[06]='\0';
  }

  endpart:
  ;

What are you trying to copy into into menuRec?

you need to refer to an char* element of the array, as you do on the following line....

I'm not too hot on pointers either! OK, I removed the * and instead of an error I got a warning "Suspicious pointer conversion".

What I'm trying to do is take the data read in to buf1 and move it to the structure, so I can access the individual fields within it.

Thanks...

That's because it's now convering a char* to an array of char * (your structure)

When you refer to your strucure like that, you are refering to the first element in your structure, it's probably best if you refer to the elements by name - for example, it wouldn't work if you added an int to the start of yor structure

You can also use ->

eg

Code:

fprintf(fpout2," %s %s \n",menuRec->MenuDes0,menuRec->MenuNam0);

Looks neater doesn't it (arrow notation)! I'll use it from now on.

menuDetail is the tag (I think!) for the structure. i.e. "struct menuDetail {...".
Is its memory not allocated by the items within it?

Originally Posted by emanresu

Looks neater doesn't it (arrow notation)! I'll use it from now on.

menuDetail is the tag (I think!) for the structure. i.e. "struct menuDetail {...".
Is its memory not allocated by the items within it?

Yes, it is, but you only have a pointer to one, not an actual one

Code:

struct menuDetail *menuRecPtr;  // ponter
struct menuDetail menuRec; // real one!

If you use this, you'll have to go back to using the . operator, as in my previous post