👀 Views: 0 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-12

c arrays pointers debugging C

I just started working with Quick question that's been bugging me - Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy. I'm currently working on a C program that processes an array of integers. I intended to implement a function that calculates the average of the elements in this array. However, I'm working with unexpected results when I try to access the elements using pointer arithmetic. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> float calculate_average(int *array, int size) { int sum = 0; for (int i = 0; i <= size; i++) { // <-- Potential scenario here sum += *(array + i); } return (float)sum / size; } int main() { int numbers[] = {10, 20, 30, 40, 50}; int size = sizeof(numbers) / sizeof(numbers[0]); float avg = calculate_average(numbers, size); printf("Average: %.2f\n", avg); return 0; } ``` When I run this code, I'm getting an average that seems off. For the input array, I expected the output to be 30.00, but instead, I get a value that's significantly higher. After some debugging, I realized I might be accessing out-of-bounds memory due to my loop condition using `<= size` instead of `< size`. This leads to processing an extra element past the end of the array, causing undefined behavior. I've tried changing the loop condition to `i < size`, but then I'm not sure if my sum calculation will work as intended. Should I also adjust the way I'm calculating the average to ensure it reflects only the intended elements? Any best practices for handling arrays and pointers in C to avoid such off-by-one errors? I want to ensure I'm following good coding practices. Thanks in advance! My development environment is Linux. For context: I'm using C on Windows. Could someone point me to the right documentation?