C++ correct way to return pointer to array from function

Question

I am fairly new to C++ and have been avoiding pointers. From what I\'ve read online I cannot return an array but I can return a pointer to it. I made a small code to test it

Answer 1

Your code (which looks ok) doesn't return a pointer to an array. It returns a pointer to the first element of an array.

In fact that's usually what you want to do. Most manipulation of arrays are done via pointers to individual elements, not via pointers to the array as a whole.

You can define a pointer to an array, for example this:

double (*p)[42];

defines p as a pointer to a 42-element array of doubles. A big problem with that is that you have to specify the number of elements in the array as part of the type -- and that number has to be a compile-time constant. Most programs that deal with arrays need to deal with arrays of varying sizes; a given array's size won't vary after it's been created, but its initial size isn't necessarily known at compile time, and different array objects can have different sizes.

A pointer to the first element of an array lets you use either pointer arithmetic or the indexing operator [] to traverse the elements of the array. But the pointer doesn't tell you how many elements the array has; you generally have to keep track of that yourself.

If a function needs to create an array and return a pointer to its first element, you have to manage the storage for that array yourself, in one of several ways. You can have the caller pass in a pointer to (the first element of) an array object, probably along with another argument specifying its size -- which means the caller has to know how big the array needs to be. Or the function can return a pointer to (the first element of) a static array defined inside the function -- which means the size of the array is fixed, and the same array will be clobbered by a second call to the function. Or the function can allocate the array on the heap -- which makes the caller responsible for deallocating it later.

Everything I've written so far is common to C and C++, and in fact it's much more in the style of C than C++. Section 6 of the comp.lang.c FAQ discusses the behavior of arrays and pointers in C.

But if you're writing in C++, you're probably better off using C++ idioms. For example, the C++ standard library provides a number of headers defining container classes such as and , which will take care of most of this stuff for you. Unless you have a particular reason to use raw arrays and pointers, you're probably better off just using C++ containers instead.

EDIT : I think you edited your question as I was typing this answer. The new code at the end of your question is, as you observer, no good; it returns a pointer to an object that ceases to exist as soon as the function returns. I think I've covered the alternatives.