Cannot cast array to pointer

Question

I have the following source:

#include 
using namespace std;

void main(int j)
{
    char arr[10][10];
    char** ptr;
    ptr = arr;
}
         


        

Answer 1

Arrays are not pointers (I notice a lot of books tend to make you think this, though). They are something completely different. A pointer is a memory address while an array is a contiguous set of some data.

In some cases, an array can decay to a pointer to its first element. You can then use pointer arithmetic to iterate through the contiguous memory. An example of this case would be when passing an array to a function as a parameter.

What you probably want to do here is something like:

char arr[10];
char * i = &arr[0];

Obviously you'll need to use 2D arrays and char** in your case. I'll leave that to you to figure out :)