Thread: clearing an char array

how would i reset an char temp [30] array back to empty

for instance, after a loop it has some string stored in it. i want to clear it.
i could do it manually by going through a loop and setting each of its elements to 0 ascii
but too annoying. is there like a built in function for that.
thanks

You can just call a handy function named "memset" which sets a specified memory range to a specified value. It works as follows.

Code:

char array[30];

// ... some computations...

// Now we clear our array
memset( array, 0, sizeof(array) );

Param 1: Pointer to destination
Param 2: Character to set
Param 3: Number of characters

NOTE: There are a few things to note here. An array acts like a pointer so we don't need to have the address-of operator before the name.

Here is another quick example to zero out the memory of a structure Foo..

Code:

Foo myStruct;

memset( &myStruct, 0, sizeof(Foo) );

It is located in the either one of these headers

memory.h
string.h

Also if you are using windows.h they have a handy macro named "ZeroMemory" which simply takes the first and third parameter of memset.

oh thats right
memset, i forgot about it
well, is there a string related function?

Originally posted by Hammer
>>Here is another quick example to zero out the memory of a structure Foo..
Be careful doing that one, if the struct contains pointers or floats they could get messed up. This is covered here .

yup, i agree with that

nah, i want to empty it completely cuz i am going through a loop to keep reading names from a file and i dont wanna use up space
so i wanna re use the char array

i was hoping that there might be some C++ function which could do it