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POAm I passing array ownership back to caller from my library function?
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copied!<p>I came to C from Python. Python has a delightfully simplistic white glove approach to manipulating strings. The more I use arrays in C, the more I think how convenient it would be to have certain features. Rather than writing loops to do this every time I need to do a particular operation, I have decided to create a library to do this.</p> <p>So, let's say I have a library and the call looks something like this:</p> <p><code>char* new_array = meatSlicer(old_array, element_start);</code></p> <p>I'm passing the pointer to the array I want changed, expecting a pointer return, and indicating what element to slice at.</p> <p>If <code>meatSlicer</code> (yes, I'm a sucker for bad naming) returns a pointer to an array that is made locally within the slicer, the pointer will be a bad pointer. So, within <code>meatSlicer()</code> I have this:</p> <pre><code> ... manipulation before the below ... char *heap_the_Array; /* put it on the heap to pass it back to caller */ heap_the_Array = malloc((size + 1) * sizeof(char)); int i; for (i = 0; i <= (size + 1); i++){ /* make it so... again */ heap_the_Array[i] = newArray[i]; /* newArray is the local */ } return heap_the_Array; /* return pointer */ </code></pre> <p><strong>My question is,</strong> am I properly returning ownership to the caller function so that it can <code>free()</code> the new array? Is passing a pointer to an array on the heap sufficient for that?</p>

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