Why won't this array get printed? - c

Question

I'm trying to write a program to take 10 words as input from the user, then store it an array, and then print out the length of each word.
Here's my code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
char *words[10];
char length[10];
int i, j;
int main()
{
printf("Input ten words: \n");
for(i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
printf("Enter element %d \n", i + 1);
scanf("%s", &words[i]);
}
for(i = 0; i < 10; i++)
printf("%c", words[i]);
for(i = j = 0; j < 10; j++)
{
length[j] = strlen(words[i]);
i++;
}
for(j = 0; j < 10; j++)
printf("%c", length[j]);
return 0;
}
It should be noted that I have no idea why the array "words" is defined as a pointer, I only do it because if I don't I get some warning about making a pointer from integer without a cast.
When I run the program what happens is, I get prompted to input the 10 elements, that much works, but then when it's supposed to print the "words" array, the program just crashes.
Also the reason I coded it like this is because later on I also need to print the longest and shortest word - so I figured it would help if I had the lengths of all the strings in their own array.
Does anyone know what's wrong here?
Thanks

Answer 1

With the line char *words[10], you are declaring an array of 10 pointers. However, these pointers are uninitialized, which means they are wild pointers. Dereferencing a wild pointer causes undefined behavior (i.e. the program may crash). If you want to use these pointers in a meaningful way, you must make each pointer point to a valid memory location, for example to an address returned by the function malloc or to the address of a char array.
However, probably the easiest solution to your problem is to not use pointers at all, but to instead declare a two-dimensional char array, like this:
char words[10][100];
That way, you are allocating space for 10 words of up to 100 characters each (including the null terminating character).
Beware that a buffer overflow will occur if the user enters a word longer than 99 (1 byte is required for the terminating null character). Therefore, the scanf line should be changed to the following:
scanf("%99s", words[i]);
That way, scanf will never attempt to write more than 100 bytes (including the terminating null character).
I have also removed the & in the scanf line above, because the & is not necessary, since words[i] will automatically decay to &words[i][0].
Also, as a general rule, you should verify that the return value of scanf is 1 before attempting to use the value that scanf wrote. For example, if the user triggers end of file on the input stream (for example by pressing CTRL-D on Linux or CTRL-Z on Windows), then scanf will return -1 without writing anything into words[i]. In that case, by subsequently reading from words[i], your program will cause undefined behavior.
Additionally, the line
printf("%c", words[i]);
must be changed to:
printf("%s", words[i]);
The loop
for(i = j = 0; j < 10; j++)
{
length[j] = strlen(words[i]);
i++;
}
can be simplified to:
for(i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
length[i] = strlen(words[i]);
}
The line
printf("%c", length[j]);
should probably be changed to
printf("%hhu", length[j]);
because length[j] does not represent the ASCII code of a character, but just a number.