Declaring and initializing arrays in C

Question

Is there a way to declare first and then initialize an array in C?

So far I have been initializing an array like this:

int myArray[SIZE] = {1,2,3,4..         


        

Answer 1

This is an addendum to the accepted answer by AndreyT, with Nyan's comment on mismatched array sizes. I disagree with their automatic setting of the fifth element to zero. It should likely be 5 --the number after 1,2,3,4. So I would suggest a wrapper to memcpy() to produce a compile-time error when we try to copy arrays of different sizes:

#define Memcpy(a,b) do {                    /* copy arrays */       \
    ASSERT(sizeof(a) == sizeof(b) &&        /* a static assert */   \
           sizeof(a) != sizeof((a) + 0));   /* no pointers */       \
    memcpy((a), (b), sizeof (b));           /* & unnecesary */      \
    } while (0)                             /* no return value */

This macro will generate a compile-time error if your array is of length 1. Which is perhaps a feature.

Because we are using a macro, the C99 compound literal seems to need an extra pair of parentheses:

Memcpy(myarray, ((int[]) { 1, 2, 3, 4 }));

Here ASSERT() is a 'static assert'. If you don't already have your own, I use the following on a number of platforms:

#define CONCAT_TOKENS(a, b) a ## b
#define EXPAND_THEN_CONCAT(a,b) CONCAT_TOKENS(a, b)
#define ASSERT(e) enum {EXPAND_THEN_CONCAT(ASSERT_line_,__LINE__) = 1/!!(e)}
#define ASSERTM(e,m) /* version of ASSERT() with message */ \
    enum{EXPAND_THEN_CONCAT(m##_ASSERT_line_,__LINE__)=1/!!(e)}