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Allocating 1-D Arrays on Heap

Explore how to dynamically allocate one-dimensional arrays on the heap in C. Learn to use malloc and calloc to allocate memory at runtime, manage array sizes based on input, and avoid stack limitations and errors like segmentation faults.

Introduction

Allocating variables dynamically on the heap is interesting, but that’s not where the heap shines. To show the true power of the heap, we’ll learn how to dynamically allocate arrays.

Consider the following motivating example. We want to read integer temperature samples from a file called temperature_samples.txt. The file can contain an arbitrary number of samples, depending on how many temperatures were registered.

On the first line, there will be a number n, the ...