The right way of doing it is like this:
int getArray(double **p)
{
int count = 0;
while(1)
{
if(count == 0)
*p = malloc(sizeof(**p));
else
*p = realloc(*p, (count+1)*sizeof(**p));
scanf("%lf", &((*p)[count]));
<...some condition to break...>
count++;
{
<...print content of p...>
return count;
}
If you pass a pointer to a function and you want to change not only the value it is pointing at, but change the address it is pointing to you HAVE to use a double pointer. It is simply not possible otherwise.
And save yourself some trouble by using sizeof(var) instead of sizeof(type). If you write int *p; p = malloc(sizeof(int));, then you are writing the same thing (int) twice, which means that you can mess things up if they don't match, which is exactly what happened to you. This also makes it harder to change the code afterwards, because you need to change at multiple places. If you instead write int *p; p = malloc(sizeof(*p)); that risk is gone.
Plus, don't cast malloc. It's completely unnecessary.
One more thing you always should do when allocating (and reallocating) is to check if the allocation was successful. Like this:
if(count == 0)
*p = malloc(sizeof(**p));
else
*p = realloc(*p, (count+1)*sizeof(**p));
if(!p) { /* Handle error */ }
Also note that it is possible to reallocate a NULL pointer, so in this case the malloc is not necessary. Just use the realloc call only without the if statement. One thing worth mentioning is that if you want to be able to continue execution if the realloc fails, you should NOT assign p to the return value. If realloc fails, you will lose whatever you had before. Do like this instead:
int getArray(double **p)
{
int count = 0;
// If *p is not pointing to allocated memory or NULL, the behavior
// of realloc will be undefined.
*p = NULL;
while(1)
{
void *tmp = realloc(*p, (count+1)*sizeof(**p));
if(!tmp) {
fprintf(stderr, "Fail allocating");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
*p = tmp;
// I prefer fgets and sscanf. Makes it easier to avoid problems
// with remaining characters in stdin and it makes debugging easier
const size_t str_size = 100;
char str[str_size];
if(! fgets(str, str_size, stdin)) {
fprintf(stderr, "Fail reading");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
if(sscanf(str, "%lf", &((*p)[count])) != 1) {
fprintf(stderr, "Fail converting");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
count++;
// Just an arbitrary exit condition
if ((*p)[count-1] < 1) {
printf("%lf\n", (*p)[count]);
break;
}
}
return count;
}
You mentioned in comments below that you're having troubles with pointers in general. That's not unusual. It can be a bit tricky, and it takes some practice to get used to it. My best advice is to learn what * and & really means and really think things through. * is the dereference operator, so *p is the value that exists at address p. **p is the value that exists at address *p. The address operator & is kind of an inverse to *, so *&x is the same as x. Also remember that the [] operator used for indexing is just syntactic sugar. It works like this: p[5] translates to *(p+5), which has the funny effect that p[5] is the same as 5[p].
In my first version of above code, I used p = tmp instead of *p = tmp and when I constructed a complete example to find that bug, I also used *p[count] instead of (*p)[count]. Sorry about that, but it does emphasize my point. When dealing with pointers, and especially pointers to pointers, REALLY think about what you're writing. *p[count] is equivalent to *(*(p+count)) while (*p)[count] is equivalent to *((*p) + count) which is something completely different, and unfortunately, none of these mistakes was caught even though I compiled with -Wall -Wextra -std=c18 -pedantic-errors.
You mentioned in comments below that you need to cast the result of realloc. That probably means that you're using a C++ compiler, and in that case you need to cast, and it should be (double *). In that case, change to this:
double *tmp = (double*)realloc(*p, (count+1)*sizeof(**p));
if(!tmp) {
fprintf(stderr, "Fail allocating");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
*p = tmp;
Note that I also changed the type of the pointer. In C, it does not matter what type of pointer tmp is, but in C++ it either has to be a double* or you would need to do another cast: *p = (double*)tmp
