Understanding the dereference, address-of, and array subscript operators in C

Question

I have argv[] defined as a char *. Using the following printf statements:

     printf("%s\n",argv[1]);   // prints out the entire string
     printf("%p\n",&argv[1]);  // & -> gets the address
     printf("%c\n",argv[1][0]);// prints out the first char of second var
     printf("%c\n",*argv[1]);  //  

It's this last one I don't understand. What does it mean to print *argv[1]? why isn't that the same as *argv[1][0] and how come you can't print out printf("%s\n",*argv[1]);. Also, why is &*argv[1] a different address then &argv[1]?

Answer 1

char *argv[]

argv is array⁽¹⁾ of char pointers. So it is normal array just each element of the array is a pointer. argv[0] is a pointer, argv[1], etc.

argv[0] - first element in the array. Since each element in the array is char pointer, value of this is also a char pointer (as we already mentioned above).

*argv[1] - Now here argv[1] is second element in the above array, but argv[1] is also a char pointer. Applying * just dereferences the pointer and you get the first character in the string to which argv[1] points to. You should use %c to print it as this is just a character.

argv[1][0] is already first character of second string in the array - so no more room for dereferencing. This is essentially same as previous.

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_{(1) as highlighted strictly saying it is pointer to pointer, but maybe you can "think" of it as array of pointers. Anyway more info about it here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/39096006/3963067}

Answer 2

The array subscript operation a[i] is defined as *(a + i) - given the address a, offset i elements (not bytes) from that address and dereference the result. Thus, given a pointer p, *p is equivalent to *(p + 0), which is equivalent to p[0].

The type of argv is char **; given that, all of the following are true:

    Expression         Type            Value
    ----------         ----            -----
          argv         char **         Pointer to a sequence of strings
         *argv         char *          Equivalent to argv[0]
        **argv         char            Equivalent to argv[0][0]
       argv[i]         char *          Pointer to a single string
      *argv[i]         char            Same as argv[i][0]
    argv[i][j]         char            j'th character of i'th string
      &argv[i]         char **         Address of the pointer to the i'th string

Since the type of argv[i][j] is char, *argv[i][j] is not a valid expression.

Here's a bad visualization of the argv sequence:

     +---+              +---+                                         +---+
argv |   | ---> argv[0] |   | ---------------------------> argv[0][0] |   |
     +---+              +---+                     +---+               +---+
                argv[1] |   | -------> argv[1][0] |   |    argv[0][1] |   |
                        +---+                     +---+               +---+
                         ...           argv[1][1] |   |                ...
                        +---+                     +---+               +---+
             argv[argc] |   | ---|||               ...   argv[0][n-1] |   |
                        +---+                     +---+               +---+
                                     argv[1][m-1] |   |
                                                  +---+

This may help explain the results of different expressions.

Answer 3

If argv[1] is a pointer to char, then *argv[1] dereferences that pointer and gets you the first character of the string at argv[1], so it's the same as argv[1][0] and is printed with the "%c" format specifier.

argv[1][0] is a char itself, not a pointer, so it's not dereferensable.

Answer 4

The last line printf("%c\n",*argv[1]); is both dereferencing argv and accessing array index 1. In other words, this is doing argv[1][0], just like the previous line, because the array subscript access [1] has a higher precedence than the dereference operator (*).

However, if you were to parenthesize the expression in the last line to make the dereference operator be processed first, you would do this:

printf("%c\n", (*argv)[1]);

Now, when you run the program, the last line of output would be argv[0][1] instead of [1][0], i.e. the second character in the command line you use to execute the program.

Answer 5

1. This is not specific to char *.
2. You can simplify by what is the difference between *ptr and ptr[0].
3. There are no difference because ptr[0] is a sugar for *(ptr + 0) or *ptr because + 0 is useless.

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// printf("%p\n", &argv[1]); is wrong you must cast to (void *)
printf("%p\n", (void *)&argv[1]);

Because %p specifier expect a void *, in normal case C auto promote your pointer into void * but printf() use variable argument list. There are a lot of rule about this, I let you read the doc if you want. But char * wiil not be promote to void * and like I say printf() except void * so you have a undefined behavior if you don't cast it yourself.