When you write the statement
*src = "anotherstring";
the compiler sees the constant string "abcdefghijklmnop"
like an array. Imagine you had written the following code instead:
char otherstring[14] = "anotherstring";
...
*src = otherstring;
Now, it's a bit clearer what is going on. The left-hand side, *src
, refers to a char
(since src
is of type pointer-to-char
) whereas the right-hand side, otherstring
, refers to a pointer.
This isn't strictly forbidden because you may want to store the address that a pointer points to. However, an explicit cast is normally used in that case (which isn't too common of a case). The compiler is throwing up a red flag because your code is likely not doing what you think it is.
It appears to me that you are trying to assign a string. Strings in C aren't data types like they are in C++ and are instead implemented with char
arrays. You can't directly assign values to a string like you are trying to do. Instead, you need to use functions like strncpy
and friends from <string.h>
and use char
arrays instead of char
pointers. If you merely want the pointer to point to a different static string, then drop the *
.