do not use sizeof for array parameters in C

 Consider the below program.

#include
void fun(int arr[])
{
int i;

/* sizeof should not be used here to get number
	of elements in array*/
int arr_size = sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]); /* incorrect use of sizeof*/
for (i = 0; i < arr_size; i++)
{
	arr[i] = i; /*executed only once */
}
}

int main()
{
int i;
int arr[4] = {0, 0 ,0, 0};
fun(arr);
	
/* use of sizeof is fine here*/
for(i = 0; i < sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]); i++)
	printf(" %d " ,arr[i]);

getchar();
return 0;
}	

Output

0 0 0 0 on a IA-32 machine.

 The function fun() receives an array parameter arr[] and tries to find out number of elements in arr[] using sizeof operator.

In C, array parameters are treated as pointers (See this for details). So the expression sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]) becomes sizeof(int *)/sizeof(int) which results in 1 for IA 32 bit machine (size of int and int * is 4) and the for loop inside fun() is executed only once irrespective of the size of the array.

Therefore, sizeof should not be used to get number of elements in such cases. A separate parameter for array size (or length) should be passed to fun(). So the corrected program is:

#include
void fun(int arr[], size_t arr_size)
{
int i;
for (i = 0; i < arr_size; i++)
{
	arr[i] = i;
}
}

int main()
{
int i;
int arr[4] = {0, 0 ,0, 0};
fun(arr, 4);
	
for(i = 0; i < sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]); i++)
	printf(" %d ", arr[i]);

getchar();
return 0;