Allocation of memory for char array

Question

Let\'s say you have-

struct Person {
    char *name;
    int age;
    int height;
    int weight; 
 };

If you do-

struct Pe         


        

Answer 1

It allocates memory for the just the pointer to a char. You need to do a separate allocation for the contents.

There are other options although:

If you are OK with having a fixed sized maximum length, you can do:

struct Person {
    char name[PERSON_NAME_MAX_LENGTH+1];
    int age;
    int height;
    int weight; 
 };

And allocate it as in your example.

Or you can declare a variable sized struct, but I wouldn't recommend this as it is tricky and you cannot have more than one variable size array per struct:

struct Person {
    int age;
    int height;
    int weight; 
    char name[]; /*this must go at the end*/
 };

and then allocate it like:

struct Person *who = malloc(sizeof(struct Person) + sizeof(char)*(name_length+1));