macOS addressing multiply arrays in C

[farmerdoug]

Say I have several arrays A1, A2, A3. I want to make strings A1, A2, A3, that can be used to address elements in the arrays. Can I do it in a single routine?

 

[spatry]

You'll have to be more precise... I'm not sure what you mean. What I understand is that you have 3 arrays (1 dimension each) called A1, A2 and A3 and I assume they are of type char, hence a string. Dereferencing ([]) will yield a char and not a string.

Sylvain...

 

[farmerdoug]

addressing

Can you use some thing like strcpy and strcat to create a string that could be used in for loop

for i ...
for j ...
A1[j] =

I'm not sure I actually want or need to do this but I was wondering.

 

[LtRammstein]

In C you can either make an array of characters (char) or you can use the string class (string.h). Either way a string is an array of char, so using proper for-loops will work.

 

[lee1210]

If you have three character arrays, and you want to access them all through a single array/name, you can declare an array of char* and assign the base of the arrays to the elements of the new array. On my phone, but I'll try to get some code written:

char A1[8],A2[8],A3[8];
char *As[3];
As[0] = A1;
As[1] = A2;
As[2] = A3;

A1 can now be accessed via As[0], etc.

-Lee

 

[farmerdoug]

addressing

Lee:

I thought about that but that circumvents the original question. You took me too literally. What if there are 100 arrays and I don't want to assign 100 extra names?

Doug

 

[lee1210]

I may still be confused, but I think you're wanting to know if you can compose the actual names of variables you want to access at runtime. I.e. When x == 7 access A7. If this is what you are asking, the answer is no. The only language I can think of (there are likely others I am unaware of) where you can do something like this is Java, using a technique referred to as reflection.
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/ALT/Reflection/

-Lee

 

[chown33]

Even after reading the whole thread, I'm still not sure I understand what the OP is asking for.

It's possible that Perl or Python could do it, since they can more freely convert between string and numeric types, and they have builtin string types and an eval function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eval#Perl

It's possible that Objective-C could do it, maybe using Key Value Coding:
http://developer.apple.com/mac/libr...Conceptual/KeyValueCoding/KeyValueCoding.html

It's also possible that all the OP wants is a way to use C strings assembled at runtime as keys in a table, to retrieve a particular array calloc'ed at runtime, that's then subscripted using numeric variables. In that case, CoreFoundation's strings, dictionaries, and arrays would probably work.

Frankly, it's hard to know what's needed here, because we don't know anything about the problem that's being addressed, only about the OP's particular approach to solving it.


To farmerdoug, please be more specific about the types (string or number) involved. Take your original statement:

Say I have several arrays A1, A2, A3. I want to make strings A1, A2, A3, that can be used to address elements in the arrays.

This is ambiguous at best.

Every array and every variable has a type. If the array A1 has type "array of string", then anything stored into it or read from must be a string. Conversely, if an array A2 has type "array of float", then it can only contain floats, which are a particular numeric type. A2 can't store int or long types, except by first converting to float, and it can't store string types at all.

So the first sentence, "Say I have several arrays A1, A2, A3." is missing an important qualifier: What types are the arrays?

The second sentence begins, "I want to make strings A1, A2, A3, ". Aha, so A1, A2, and A3 are arrays of strings using a single subscript.

The rest of the sentence, "... that can be used to address elements in the arrays." then defines the rest of the problem. But it doesn't give any examples. Exactly what would one of these strings be? Would the string "A1[n]" work? How about "A1[n+3]"?

Since we have no examples, and you haven't described even a tiny fraction of the data, there's simply no context in which to understand the problem to solve, much less how to propose a solution to that problem.

I'm still thinking that C is not the best language for doing this program. It's too low-level. You're having a lot of trouble just doing fundamental stuff like creating and freeing the arrays. That's usually a bad sign.

Other languages like Perl or Python have builtin honest-to-$deity string types, not just C's array-of-chars-masquerading-as-strings. They also have builtin types for dictionaries and associative arrays (i.e. arrays subscripted by any type, not just numbers). And they don't need low-level memory management like calloc() and free(). Best of all, with CPU speed and memory as plentiful as they are, these languages are plenty fast.

 

[spatry]

C++ would be the natural progression. C++ 2003 has all the data structures you'll need.

 

[ScoobyMcDoo]

I think you are asking if you can create a table of strings. If so, yes - one way to do it:

char StringTable[TableSize][StringSize];

Then if you want say copy the string "Hi There" into the 3rd entry in the table you would write something like:

strcpy( StringTable[2], "Hi There" );

 

[Sydde]

If you are creating a persistent object, my inclination would be to use a pointer array. I would do it something like this

char **  makeStringArray( int  arraySize, int stringSize ) {
  char  **theArray;
  int     arrayCtr;
  // allocate some number of pointers
  theArray = malloc( sizeof( char* ) * arraySize );
  for ( arrayCtr = 0 ; arrayCtr < arraySize ; arrayCtr++ ) {
      *( theArray + arrayCtr ) = malloc( sizeOf( char ) * stringSize );
  }
  return theArray;
}

Then, when you have to access an element in a string in the pointer array, you could do it like

aChar = *( *( anArray + anArrayIndex ) + aCharIndex );

C will automatically scale indexes to the sizeof the pointer's targets.

This has the advantage of allowing for a flexible data structure that can grow or shrink in size and can contain strings of variable size. The disadvantage is that you have to allocate and deallocate each char array separately.