How to allocate and deallocate heap memory for 2D array?

Question

I\'m used to PHP, but I\'m starting to learn C. I\'m trying to create a program that reads a file line by line and stores each line to an array.

So far I have a prog

Answer 1

While a multidimensional array can solve this problem, a rectangular 2D array would not really be the natural C solution.

Here is a program that initially reads the file into a linked list, and then allocates a vector of pointers of the right size. Each individual character does then appear as array[line][col] but in fact each row is only as long as it needs to be. It's C99 except for .

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

typedef struct strnode {
  char *s;
  struct strnode *next;
} strnode;

strnode *list_head;
strnode *list_last;

strnode *read1line(void) {
  char space[1024];
  if(fgets(space, sizeof space, stdin) == NULL)
    return NULL;
  strnode *node = malloc(sizeof(strnode));
  if(node && (node->s = malloc(strlen(space) + 1))) {
    strcpy(node->s, space);
    node->next = NULL;
    if (list_head == NULL)
      list_head = node;
    else
      list_last->next = node;
    list_last = node;
    return node;
  }
  err(1, NULL);
}

int main(int ac, char **av) {
  int n;
  strnode *s;

  for(n = 0; (s = read1line()) != NULL; ++n)
    continue;
  if(n > 0) {
    int i;
    strnode *b;
    char **a = malloc(n * sizeof(char *));
    printf("There were %d lines\n", n);
    for(b = list_head, i = 0; b; b = b->next, ++i)
      a[i] = b->s;
    printf("Near the middle is: %s", a[n / 2]);
  }
  return 0;
}