[OCLUG-devel] malloc() woes

[James Colannino]

I hope my frequent questions on the list don't start to annoy anyone. 
I'm having some trouble figuring out how to expand a variable's size if
it's not big enough.  I've already written the code, and so far, most of
what I've written doesn't cause the compiler to spit out any errors
(although I'll probably have some bugs the first time I run it.) 
There's one thing that I can't get around though.  Here's a snippet of
code to illustrate what I'm doing:

char buffer[BUFFER_SIZE];
/* BUFFER_SIZE is a constant - it's currently set to 80 */

char *buffer2;
/* this is used as temporary storage for a new pointer */

fgets (buffer, sizeof(buffer), file);
/* for the sake of brevity, the code dealing with file is not here */

if (buffer[BUFFER_SIZE] != '\n') {
    buffer2 = more_memory(buffer);

/* the function more_memory() returns a pointer to new memory if it was
successful and the old pointer if it was not.  After this function is
called, I do some checking to make sure buffer2 != buffer (which would
mean that it just returned the same pointer, and thus,  there isn't
enough memory) then I try to do the following: */

buffer = buffer2;

This results in the following compiler error:

"incompatible types in assignment"

I tried different variations that I knew would probably also fail such as:

buffer = (char *)buffer2;
&buffer[0] = (char *)buffer2;

I of course didn't expect those to work, but it was a vain attempt to
try and figure out why I can't do this.  I slowly realized that while
typing buffer by itself does denote a pointer to the string, the
variable buffer isn't directly declared as a pointer but rather as an
array, so I'm guessing that since buffer2 is a pointer and buffer is a
character array, that's where my problem is.  But now I can't figure out
how to get buffer to point to the new block of memory :(

Any ideas?  Thanks in advance :)

James

P.S. If I get annoying just let me know ;)

-- 
My blog: http://www.crazydrclaw.com/
My homepage: http://james.colannino.org/

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