Correct way to initialize a NULL-terminated array of strings in C

Question

Is this code correct?

char *argv[] = { \"foo\", \"bar\", NULL };

Answer 1

It's syntactically correct, and it does create a NULL-terminated array of strings.

argv is passed to main as char*[] (or equivalently, char**), but it's "more correct" to treat string literals as a const char* rather than a char*. So with this particular example you'd want const char *argv[] = {"foo", "bar", NULL };

Maybe you aren't really going to initialise it with "foo", but actually with a modifiable string that you will want to modify via argv. In that case char*[] is right. This is the kind of thing Charles probably means by saying that whether code is "correct" depends on what you do with it.