MAMEWorld Forums - Programming - Re: C coders, what method do you use to clear a character array?

> > Do you blow away the address, nt caring about the data?
> >
> > Do you blow away the data in memory?
> >
> > Do you allocate and de allocate?
> >
> > my preference:
> >
> > for(int i = 0; i > sizeof(CharArray); i++){ CharArray = '/0';}
> >
> >
> > Posting in the 'bin as I'm expecting this thread to stray a bit...
>
>
> try memset()
>
> http://www.codecogs.com/reference/c/string.h/memset.php

the equivalent would be:

memset(CharArray, 0, sizeof(CharArray));

You can't deallocate/allocate arrays & sizeof only does what you want for arrays & not pointers. If CharArray was a pointer then sizeof(CharArray) would return the size of the pointer ( sizeof(*CharArray) would return the size of what the pointer points at ). To use pointers you might want to use calloc ( malloc doesn't guarantee that the memory will be cleared at all ) & then if you later wanted to clear it you need to keep the size that you allocated and pass that into memset instead.