hi

im having some trouble with finding the size of an array,

for example:

struct MyStruct{
int num;
};

MyStruct *ms = new MyStruct[1];

now what i want it do do is find out how many arrays ms has and adds 1 array to it

so it would look like this

ms[2];
//find the size + 1
ms[3];
//find the size + 1
ms[4];

// and so on....

any suggestions?

thanks

I have two suggestions, but they both may involve building the array a different way. The first is to always create a NULL element at the end of an array, then you can just traverse the array until you hit a NULL element. This is very widely used throughout the system, and a lot of people use it in code. The other suggestion is to use a container structure. The structure has two elements: the array and a count of the array size ( if you use it inclusively then you can use the count looping comparisons and so forth ). As there is no guarantee as to what a given point in memory will contain on the heap ( ie, they may or may not be zeroed pages at the point of use ), I do not think you can rely on the actual array itself. There are other methods of approaching this, but I like these two.

hrmmm ok

but i get an error or something:

here is my source:

typedef struct{
char buff;
short ID;
string Name;
string Number;
string Address;
}Fields;

//Create object of type Fields
//Fields Entry;
Fields* pEntry = new Fields[1];
pEntry[1].buff = NULL;

and i get an error on the line with

pEntry[1].buff = NULL;

it says i have an error before the '.' (period)

any suggestions?

I believe you have to dereference pEntry first, so you would do

or

bahh i still get the same errors except for the first one it says i have a syntax before the '->' token
hrrmmmm

any suggestions? haha

the thing is that,

pEntry.[1].buff = NULL;

is in the global scope

but when i move that line into any of my functions or into main(), it works just fine O.o

the thing is, i need it in the global scope! hahah

yeah this is realy weird

I might be tripping out, its been a while since I coded in c or c++, but I believe that this:

Fields* pEntry = new Fields[1];
pEntry[1].buff = NULL;

is equivalent to

Fields* pEntry = new Fields;
pEntry[1].buff = NULL;

It looks to me like you are creating a array size 1 and then trying to dereference it at position 1 which is the second position in the array. This would cause a segmentation fault or illegal operation.

Also it looks like you want an array of pointer objects but you are creating an array of objects so your declaration should look more like the following:

Fields **array;

array = new *Fields[some number hopefully larger than 1];
array[i]= &someObject; or NULL;

then you access it like:
array[i]->dataMember= something;

The thing is in C the global scope is only for declarations and not for program code. All program code must be in a function (like main). Hence it is legal to say

In the global space but not

because the new operator is executable code and not compiler declaration.

What you probably want is something like


Or something like that

see www.boost.org and look up smart pointers. Smart pointers know how many elements are in an array.