I'm no computer scientist,

Shaggy — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 02:39:43 +0000

I'm no computer scientist, but I've always handled it by looking for null in the defined size of the array as the signal to stop processing. In pseudo code:

If you're filling the array sequentially
While (array element not equal null) and (in bounds of defined size of array)
do processing on element
get next element
End-While

Or not...
For all elements in the defined size of the array
if element is not null
do processing on element
end-if
End-For

Cheers,
Shaggy

Sounds like a lot of work

pr0gr4mm3r — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:20:16 +0000

Sounds like a lot of work just to get a the size of an array.

I either just pass the

Wellsie1116 — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:27:01 +0000

I either just pass the length of the array along with the array or use a linked list. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

The problem is that sizeof

teammatt3 — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:24:00 +0000

The problem is that sizeof is executed at compile time, not runtime.

That's good to know.

This array size does change during run time. I've searched a ton of forums, and it doesn't look like it can be done. I guess I'll have to pass in the array length to every function. Not a huge deal. I just thought there would be a better way.

The problem is that sizeof

Wellsie1116 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:08:00 +0000

The problem is that sizeof is executed at compile time, not runtime. What this means is that the compiler knows the size of the array in main, because it was declared in main. But in your function, all it knows is that it has an array, but has no idea how large it is. Because it does not know how many elements are in the array, it just treats it as a pointer and returns the size of the pointer (4 in your case, and 8 in my case (64-bit os)) resulting in the wrong length of 1 (or 2 in my case).

If the size of the array will never change during runtime, why not just declare the size of the array as a preprocessor variable:

#define ARRAY_SIZE 10

then if you want to declare an array of ints:

int nums[ARRAY_SIZE];