Arrays of Arrays

Array of C-strings

An array of C-strings is an array of arrays. Here is an example.

char* days[] = {"Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri"};

In the above days array each element is a pointer to a string, and they don't have to be the same size. For example,

char * greetings[] = {"Hello", "Goodbye", "See you later"};

Parameters to main

When the main function is called, it is passed the name of the program that is being run and all the tokens (words) on the remainder of the line that was used to run the program. These are passed to the main as an array of C-strings and the number of elements in the array. Here is a main program that prints these parameters.

#include 
using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    for (int i=0; i
        cout << argv[i] << endl;
    }
    return 0;
}

Array of pointers or pointer to pointer

Because arrays and pointers are so interchangeable, you can write the header of main like this also:

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { ...

Accepting command line arguments in c/c++

In C++ it is possible to accept command line arguments. Command-line arguments are given after the name of a program in command-line operating systems like DOS or Linux, and are passed in to the program from the operating system. To use command line arguments in your program, you must first understand the full declaration of the main function, which previously has accepted no arguments. In fact, main can actually accept two arguments: one argument is number of command line arguments, and the other argument is a full list of all of the command line arguments.

The full declaration of main looks like this:

int main ( int argc, char *argv[] )

The integer, argc is the ARGument Count (hence argc). It is the number of arguments passed into the program from the command line, including the name of the program.

The array of character pointers is the listing of all the arguments. argv[0] is the name of the program, or an empty string if the name is not available. After that, every element number less than argc are command line arguments. You can use each argv element just like a string, or use argv as a two dimensional array. argv[argc] is a null pointer.

How could this be used? Almost any program that wants its parameters to be set when it is executed would use this. One common use is to write a function that takes the name of a file and outputs the entire text of it onto the screen.

#include 
#include 

using namespace std;

int main ( int argc, char *argv[] )
{
  if ( argc != 2 ) // argc should be 2 for correct execution
    // We print argv[0] assuming it is the program name
    cout<<"usage: "<< argv[0] <<" \n";
  else {
    // We assume argv[1] is a filename to open
    ifstream the_file ( argv[1] );
    // Always check to see if file opening succeeded
    if ( !the_file.is_open() )
      cout<<"Could not open file\n";
    else {
      char x;
      // the_file.get ( x ) returns false if the end of the file
      //  is reached or an error occurs
      while ( the_file.get ( x ) )
        cout<< x;
    }
    // the_file is closed implicitly here
  }
}

This program is fairly simple. It incorporates the full version of main. Then it first checks to ensure the user added the second argument, theoretically a file name. The program then checks to see if the file is valid by trying to open it. This is a standard operation that is effective and easy. If the file is valid, it gets opened in the process. The code is self-explanatory, but is littered with comments, you should have no trouble understanding its operation this far into the tutorial. :-)