pointers and pointers to a structure

[gyuunyuu]

I need to read words from a text file, build a structure to store the word and its occurrence. From what I was told from my TA, I need to read words, determine its size (how many chars) and allocate memory for its size. Then I need to build an array of pointers and point the pointers to structures that stores words.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

struct word {
    int count; // counter to use the word's occurrence
    char wrd[0];
}*wordptr[50];
int main()
{
    int position = 0; // increment for each word found, till 50
    FILE *myfile;

    if ((myfile = fopen("wordlist", "r")) == NULL) {
        printf("\n Error:Can't open file \n ");
        exit(0);
    }

    char temp[99]; // temp char array to store words read from file
    while (fscanf(myfile, "%s", temp) != EOF) {
        wordptr[position] = (struct word *) malloc(sizeof(struct word));
        printf("temp is: %s\n", temp);
        strcpy(wordptr[position]->wrd, temp);
        wordptr[position]->count = 1; // assign 1 for now
        printf("wordptr[%d].wrd: %s\n", position, wordptr[position]->wrd);
        position++;
        if (position == 50) {
            break;
        }
    }

    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < 50; i++){
    // see if I'm doing it right
    printf("at %d, count:%d, wrd:%s\n", i, wordptr[i]->count, wordptr[i]->wrd);
    }
    return 0;
}

Everything seems to be working like I want, but am I doing anything wrong? Especially in declaring pointers and arrays of char. I'm kinda confused with pointers and them pointing to structures. So does the array of pointer actually stores all the values of the structure?

[prvnkmr194]

Why you dont try fread() and fwrite() function which are capable of reading and whole structure at once example of fwrite()

#include <stdio.h>

struct mystruct
{
  int i;
  char ch;
};

int main(void)
{
   FILE *stream;
   struct mystruct s;

   if ((stream = fopen("TEST.$$$", "wb")) == NULL) /* open file TEST.$$$ */
   {
      fprintf(stderr, "Cannot open output file.\n");
      return 1;
   }
   s.i = 0;
   s.ch = 'A';
   fwrite(&s, sizeof(s), 1, stream); /* write struct s to file */
   fclose(stream); /* close file */
   return 0;
}

[Ancient Dragon]

The structure is declared incorrectly -- wrd needs to be a pointer so that it can be allocated at runtime.

struct word {
    int count; // counter to use the word's occurrence
    char* wrd;
}*wordptr[50];

line 21: >>wordptr[position] = (struct word *) malloc(sizeof(struct word));

You need to do two things here
1. allocate an instance of the structure because the array is just an array of pointers. All the pointers have to be allocated memory before they can be used.
2. Allocate memory for wrd within the structure.

wordptr[position] = malloc(sizeof(struct word));
wordptr[position]->wrd = malloc( strlen(temp)+1 );
// now you can copy temp into wrd

[Ancient Dragon]

Why you dont try fread() and fwrite() function which are capable of reading and whole structure at once example of fwrite()

Because he's only reading words from some text file, not the structure.

[gyuunyuu]

Thank you! Just what I needed!