Dynamic Arrays with undeclared size

from a friend:

i wanna declare a string array, however, i dunno the size of the array before the call the main, sth like this:

int num;
char *names[]; // this line looks wrong, but i dunno how else to put it

....

int main() {

....

num = some_number // num gets assigned;
names = new char[num][256];

....
}

256 can be the max length of the strings in the array, if allocating that memory at the beginning is of any use
i didn't tho, b/c i'm thinking, array of strings is actually a pointer to an array of chars, so it'd look like char[][256], but the compiler's gonna complain about that...

i've tried various combinations of char[][], *char[], etc etc...
these generate conversion errors...

the whole problem stems from the fact that i must dynamically assign the size (i.e. dunno the size of the array before getting to main)

thx!! i also dont mind if someone'd tell me how to assign strings into the array after successfully declaring the array also, just in case.

you were close. you just need to remove the last brackets in this line: names = new char[num][256];
so it looks like this: names = new char[num];

that will create an array of maxSize num.

edit: the new function returns a pointer to the allocated memory. so names must be a pointer to a character:

char *names = new char[num];

Ah...i c...I'll test it out later tonight....
thanks...


p.s. additional replys or rebuttals will be good too...it's nice to learn different solutions and other ppl's views...

thanks!

http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/q6.16.html

Happy reading

Remember,

only declares a array of pointer to string objects. You have to alloc memory for every string, too.

Do not forget to free the memory you've assigned.