C Char pointers

Question

Let us say we have a array of pointers:

char *ptr[30];

Now this works fine, and doesn\'t seems to do anything unexpected! I can input names easi

Answer 1

When you define a pointer like:

char *ptr = 0; // NULL pointer: dereferencing it will crash
puts(ptr);    // crash

You merely create a link to a place in memory:

ptr = "string"; // dereferencing it will show the string
puts(ptr);     // displaying "string"

So having an array of pointers merely creates a list of references to other variables.

To reference a place in memory, you then have to assign variables to your pointers, or allocate memory for each pointer.