如何使用C语言初始化一个空的Buffer

Question

I'm doing a work in wish I have to read caracters from a File, and save them in a buffer. Later i have to output them, but for know I'm still struggling with the buffer thing. I would like to know how can I initialize the buffer(empty of course) and then put caracters into that buffer. I want to do it in another function who is called by int main(..).Here's waht I have:

buffer_t initBuffer(void) {
    // Reserves space for the buffer, ends program if it cant reserve     space.

    buffer_t buffer = malloc(sizeof(*buffer)); 
    if (buffer == NULL) {
        printf("Error allocating bufefr\n");
        exit(1);
    }

after this, how can I initialize it with his counter at 0?

---

Definition of buffer_t :

typedef struct buffer_s *buffer_t;

struct buffer_s {
    unsigned char buffer[BUF_SIZE];
    counter;
}

Answer 1

There are two apprroaches for two different needs. Choose whichever suits your requirement.

• If you want to initialize your allocated memory area to 0 , you can use calloc() to directly do that (allocate and initialize to 0 ).

• If you want to initialize your allocated buffer to some other value, you can use memset() after doing a malloc() .