When a pointer to a particular type (say int
, char
, float
, ..) is incremented, its value is increased by the size of that data type. I
Void pointers can point to any memory chunk. Hence the compiler does not know how many bytes to increment/decrement when we attempt pointer arithmetic on a void pointer. Therefore void pointers must be first typecast to a known type before they can be involved in any pointer arithmetic.
void *p = malloc(sizeof(char)*10);
p++; //compiler does how many where to pint the pointer after this increment operation
char * c = (char *)p;
c++; // compiler will increment the c by 1, since size of char is 1 byte.