Cannot assign an array to another

Question

I tried through different ways to copy an array pointer to another one, without any success. Here are my attempts, with the associated error message.

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Answer 1

You cannot assign arrays in C. Use memcpy to copy an array into another.

coordinates coord2;

memcpy(coord2, coord, sizeof coord2);

Answer 2

Your coordinates need to be initialized as pointers

coordinates *coords2, *coords3;

Try that out and then assign.

Answer 3

You cannot assign one array to another using the assignment operator, e.g. a = b, because an array doesn't know the size of itself.

This is the reason why we cannot assign one array to another using the assignment operator.

Answer 4

When arrays are passed by value, they decay to pointers. The common trick to work around that is wrapping your fixed-size array in a struct, like this:

struct X {
    int val[5];
};

struct X a = {{1,2,3,4,5}};
struct X b;
b = a;
for(i=0;i!=5;i++)
    printf("%d\n",b.val[i]);

Now you can pass your wrapped arrays by value to functions, assign them, and so on.