Stupid pointer problems

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  13 years ago

  by ursskmdali

  Mohammad Ali

  , India

  Joined 13 years ago
  I haven't done C programming in AGES and for some reason, I can't seem to recall how to handle stuff like this.

  In my .h file, I have a struct defined as:

  struct tagCLIENT
  {
      char * advertisedIPAddr;
      char* actualIPAddr;
      char * clientID;
      int udpPort;
      time_t age;
  }  CLIENT;
  
  

  I then have a function:

   CLIENT** LoadClientsFile(char* filename);
   

  I'm getting an error on this last line. I assume, for some, it doesn't like the CLIENT**.

   
  I'm actually compiling with gcc, so the error message is a bit differen than I'd probably get with MS C/C++ compiler. The error message is simply, "syntax error before '*' token"

   
  What am I doing wrong?

   
  If I change the return type to void* it works fine. 

   Thanks.
   

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  13 years ago

  by Mohammad Rastkar

  Mohammad Rastkar

  Shiraz, Iran

  Joined 14 years ago

  CLIENT is a variable of type tagCLIENT , you can't use a variable for return type of a function (if do that, will be assumed as a definition statement, by the compiler), instead you should use a type .

  => I think you mean this one :

  tagCLIENT** LoadClientsFile(char* filename);
  

  ======================================= 

  => or you can do the following method (typedef statement), then CLIENT will be equivalent to tagCLIENT.

  typedef struct tagCLIENT
  {
      char * advertisedIPAddr;
      char* actualIPAddr;
      char * clientID;
      int udpPort;
      time_t age;
  }  CLIENT;

  CLIENT** LoadClientsFile(char* filename);

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