C append chars into char array one by one - c

Question

I have made up a function which returns some chars , all I want to do is to append all those returned chars into one string .
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
char func(int n);
int main()
{
int i;
char str[] = "";
size_t p = strlen(str);
for (i =0 ; i < 5; i++){
str[p++] = func(i);
str[p] = '\0';
p++;
}
printf("%s",str);
return 0;
}
char func(int n){
if (n == 0)
return '1';
if (n == 1)
return '2';
if (n > 1)
return '3';
}
//EDIT Output for this is 19

Answer 1

char func(n){
if (n == 0)
return '1';
if (n == 1)
return '2';
if (n > 1)
return '3';
}
You should always specify the type for variables.
Please use something like int n instead of just n.
It's also bad that all of your returns are conditional, it's better to have a return statement that's guaranteed to be executed no matter what *:
char func(int n) {
if (n == 0) return '1';
if (n == 1) return '2';
return '3';
}
* Because not returning a value from a function that should return a value is undefined behaviour.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's have a look at your main():
int main() {
int i;
char str[] = "";
size_t p = strlen(str);
for (i =0 ; i < 5; i++){
str[p++] = func(i);
str[p] = '\0';
p++;
}
printf("%s",str);
return 0;
}
str[] is not big enough to store all the characters you write to it, resulting in undefined behaviour.
Your loop body is written in a weird way, why are you incrementing p twice?
Here a very simple program that writes 5 characters into str:
#include <stdio.h>
char func(int n) {
if (n == 0) return '1';
if (n == 1) return '2';
return '3';
}
int main() {
int i;
// Allocate 6 bytes (5 characters) on the stack
char str[6] = "";
for (i = 0 ; i < 5; i++) {
str[i] = func(i);
}
// Strings *must* be NULL terminated in C
str[5] = 0;
printf("%s",str);
return 0;
}

Answer 2

The size of your str here is "0" (0 using the strlen and 1 using the sizeof operator because it counts the '\0' caracter) so you can not add more element to the str, and if you try, the program will crash. So you have two possibilies here, the first is to declare a fixed table size and the number n will be limited by the size, the second is a dynamic one using mallic. To intialize it to zeros you can just use the memset API.

Answer 3

Well short answer is everything you did would be right if you have in the array enough memory to hold those 5 characters and the \0 if you want to treat it as a string (NUL terminated char array).
"" is a string literal containing only the \0. Length of this string is 0. What about the array? Applying sizeof over it reveals that it is capable of holding one character. (Well it contained \0).
Now with your code you surely did access positions that are beyond the size of the array. This is undefined behavior - mentioned by the C standard.
Solution is to either have an array having size capable of holding the maximum character you would like to store someday. Or you can have a char* to which you can assign address of allocated chunk by using functions like malloc,realloc etc. Benefit of this, you can increase memory as much as you need on runtime depending on the number of characters you want to store.