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An In-Depth Understanding of Memory and Pointers in C

Returning Pointers to Strings

Understand the risks involved in returning pointers to local string variables and how constant string literals stored in read-only memory provide a safe alternative. Learn about memory allocation on the stack and why returning pointers to non-static local variables leads to invalid memory access or program crashes.

We'll cover the following...

Returning pointers to strings

Let’s declare two strings in a function:

char* func()
{
    char str1[]   = "Hello";
    char str2[16] = "World";

    return str1; //return str2;
}

Both str1 and str2 are local variables of func. They get allocated when the function starts executing. Their stack frame is invalidated when the function ...