warning assignment makes integer from pointer without a cast

Question

When I declare a char   to a fixed string and reuse the pointer to point to another string     initial declaration    char  src    abcdefghijklmnop             I get the    warning  assignment makes integer from pointer without a cast      src   anotherstring     I tried to recast the pointer but no success

User · Answer

The expression  src refers to the first character in the string  not the whole string   To reassign src to point to a different string tgt  use src   tgt

User · Answer

What Jeremiah said  plus the compiler issues the warning because the production   src   anotherstring    says  take the address of  anotherstring  --  anotherstring  IS a char pointer -- and store that pointer indirect through src   src         into the first char of the string  abcdef     The warning might be baffling because there is nowhere in your code any mention of any integer  the warning seems nonsensical  But  out of sight behind the curtain  is the rule that  int  and  char  are synonymous in terms of storage  both occupy the same number of bits  The compiler doesn t differentiate when it issues the warning that you are storing into an integer  Which  BTW  is perfectly OK and legal but probably not exactly what you want in this code   -- pete

User · Answer

The warning comes from the fact that you re dereferencing src in the assignment   The expression  src has type char  which is an integral type   The expression  anotherstring  has type char  14   which in this particular context is implicitly converted to type char    and its value is the address of the first character in the array   So  you wind up trying to assign a pointer value to an integral type  hence the warning   Drop the   from  src  and it should work as expected   src    anotherstring     since the type of src is char

User · Answer

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  lt string h gt  and use char arrays instead of char pointers   If you merely want the pointer to point to a different static string  then drop the

[c] warning: assignment makes integer from pointer without a cast

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