Hi,

is it possible to find out the size of an array created on the free store?

thanks

Not without resorting to non-portable solutions. Just do what everyone else does and don't lose the size that was passed to the allocation function.

Thanks Narue,
any chance to know why that is?

Also, the function I have to do takes an array as a parameter and needs to know the size of the array and then loop through all members of it. Have you got a suggestion on how to do it?

Pass the size as a parameter. void foo ( char *buff, size_t size ); kinda thing.

>any chance to know why that is?
No, no chance at all.

Salem,
I don't know the size and it's exactly what I'm trying to find out (I'm trying to build a function that takes an array as a parameter, finds out the size of the array and loops through all members of it)

>I don't know the size
Change your code so that you do. Put simply, if you don't know the size of an array parameter in a function you wrote, you've written bad code.

Unless it's an array of chars, which if you regard it as a string, is conventionally marked at the end with a \0, then you're stuck.

Given void foo ( char *p ); Then

char a[10];
char *p = malloc( 20 );
foo( a );
foo( p );

As far as foo() is concerned, there's nothing standard to tell what kind of memory it is, or how big that memory is.

Further, this is also valid foo ( &p[5] ); which would almost certainly break any non-standard API which only worked on the result of malloc calls.

commented: Thanks. The kind of answer I needed. +1

You can loop through a string and find the '/0' though, correct?

You can loop through a string and find the '/0' though, correct?

Almost. You can loop through a c-style-string (an array of char) and find the '\0' (backslash) to find it's length. But you could also use strlen() which is a function specially made for this :)

Hi,
thanks for the answers,

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.