Jagged arrays using pointers and malloc

Hello all. I'm a beginner in C and I'm having trouble making a jagged array and understanding how to use it using pointers and malloc.

I would like to be able to make an array of strings. (I'm making a parseline function.)

How do I convert

char words[10][50];
words[0][0]='h';
words[0][1]='i';
words[1][0]='w';
words[1][1]='o';
words[1][2]='r';
words[1][3]='l';
words[1][4]='d';
printf("%s \n",words[0]); //Output is hi
printf("%s \n",words[1]); //Output is world. It's supposed to be but it's printing worldi for some reason.

in terms of pointers and malloc?

> //Output is world. It's supposed to be but it's printing worldi for some reason.
Where are these lines?

If you don't end your strings properly with a \0, you're likely to print garbage.

What kind of dynamic array do you want?

I see. I really want variable length words and number of words because it's based on whatever the user gives.

Am I supposed to use *(*(words+j)+k) when I'm adding a letter to a word and *(words+j) when I'm trying to print the word? Or since it's a pointer to a pointer of chars I need to iterate to print the whole word?

Well you would start things off with
char **words = malloc( numWords * sizeof(char*) );

Then later
words[0] = malloc( (strlen(aWord)+1) * sizeof(char) );
strcpy(words[0], aWord);


If you don't know numWords in advance, then just make a guess and read up on realloc() so you can extend the array of pointers as needed.

Thank you so much! Your explanation of how to allocate memory for pointers to pointers and the importance of inserting the '\0' was extremely helpful! Everything is working fine now.