Array.md

ARRAYS

An array in the C programming language is series of variables of the same type: a dozen of float variables, hundreds of int variables, or a string of char variables. It’s like a series of cubbyholes into which you stick different values.

An array is declared like any other variable. It’s given a type and a name and then also a set of square brackets. Instead of declaring individual variables, such as number0, number1, ..., and number99, you declare one array variable such as numbers and use numbers[0], numbers[1], and ..., numbers[99] to represent individual variables. A specific element in an array is accessed by an index.

The following statement declares the numbers array:

int numbers[5];

Declaring Arrays

To declare an array in C, a programmer specifies the type of the elements and the number of elements required by an array as follows:

type arrayName [arraySize];

This is called a single-dimensional array. The arraySize must be an integer constant greater than zero and type can be any valid C data type. For example, to declare a 10-element array called balance of type double, use this statement −

double balance[10];

Here balance is a variable array which is sufficient to hold up to 10 double numbers.

Initialising Arrays

You can initialise an array in C either one by one or using a single statement as follows −

double balance[5] = {1000.0, 2.0, 3.4, 7.0, 50.0};

The number of values between braces { } cannot be larger than the number of elements that we declare for the array between square brackets [ ].

If you omit the size of the array, an array just big enough to hold the initialisation is created. Therefore, if you write −

double balance[] = {1000.0, 2.0, 3.4, 7.0, 50.0};

You will create exactly the same array as you did in the previous example. Following is an example to assign a single element of the array −

balance[4] = 50.0;

The above statement assigns the 5th element in the array with a value of 50.0. All arrays have 0 as the index of their first element which is also called the base index and the last index of an array will be total size of the array minus 1. Shown below is the pictorial representation of the array we discussed above −

Accessing Array Elements

An element is accessed by indexing the array name. This is done by placing the index of the element within square brackets after the name of the array. For example −

double salary = balance[9];

The above statement will take the 10th element from the array and assign the value to salary variable. The following example Shows how to use all the three above mentioned concepts viz. declaration, assignment, and accessing arrays −

#include <stdio.h>
 
int main () {

   int n[10]; /* n is an array of 10 integers */
   int i, j;
 
   /* initialise elements of array */
   for ( i = 0; i < 10; i++ ) {
      n[i] = i + 100; /* set element at location i to i + 100 */
   }
   
   /* output each array element's value */
   for (j = 0; j < 10; j++ ) {
      printf( "Element[%d] = %d\n", j, n[j] );
   }

   return 0;
}

When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result −

Element[0] = 100
Element[1] = 101
Element[2] = 102
Element[3] = 103
Element[4] = 104
Element[5] = 105
Element[6] = 106
Element[7] = 107
Element[8] = 108
Element[9] = 109