Member Avatar for savinki

why cant we use strcat without initialing first parameter?
e.g.
char *b = "a";
char *a;
strcat(a,b);

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Radical Edward
Member Avatar for Asat232

MSDN says about strcat:
char *strcat( char *strDestination, const char *strSource );
Parameters
strDestination
Null-terminated destination string

strSource
Null-terminated source string

In your case pointer a is unitialized and does not point to null-terminated string.

Member Avatar for Radical Edward

> why cant we use strcat without initialing first parameter?
Because the first parameter is the array that strcat writes to. It can't be an uninitialized pointer because you have to own the memory that the pointer points to and it can't be a pointer to a string literal because string literals are read-only.

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