Why character pointer is getting assigned just a character, while a string is supposed to get assigned to it?

Question

A string contains three parts separated by space. First two parts are strings and the third part is an integer.

The output of the below program is surprising me.

Answer 1

This line is wrong:

arr=malloc(N*sizeof **arr);

it should be:

arr=malloc(N*sizeof *arr);

**arr is a char, so it's only allocating space for N bytes, but you need space for N pointers, which are 4 bytes. So you're not allocating enough space, and then you're writing outside the array bounds, resulting in undefined behavior.

DEMO