Can't assign a pointer to primitive in C?

Question

I am wondering why this can compile:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char const* argv[])
{
    char *str[3];
    char x = 'a';
    char *px;
    px = &x;
    str[0] = px;
    return 0;
}

while this cannot:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char const* argv[])
{
    char *str[3];
    str[1] = &'a';
    return 0;
}

decla.c: In function ‘main’:
decla.c:9:14: error: lvalue required as unary ‘&’ operand

Answer 1

Put a little simplistically, you can only take the address of a variable; a literal like 'a' is not a variable.

ISO/IEC 9899:2011 §6.5.3.2 Address and indirection operators

Constraints

¶1 The operand of the unary & operator shall be either a function designator, the result of a [] or unary * operator, or an lvalue that designates an object that is not a bit-field and is not declared with the register storage-class specifier.

The quote from the standard means that you can use:

• &array[i]
• &*ptr
• &function

or a variable, or a member of a structure or union type:

• &var
• &ptr->member
• &obj.member

Etc.

Answer 2

Several replies say that you can only take the address of named variables, but that's not entirely right: if you're using C99 or greater, you can also take the address of a compound literal or a field of a compound literal. Usually this is useful for eg calling a function that takes an in pointer to some struct, which you only need to create for the duration of the call. Example: draw(&(struct point){ 5, 10 });

Some avenues by which this could be used to obtain the address of a scalar [edited with explanations]:

// create a char array containing only 'a', dereference to get 'a', and take its address
char *c = &*(char[]){'a'};  

// same as above, but using an array subscript
char *c = & (char[]){'a'}[0];        

/* create a literal for one unnamed struct containing only the char member "c",
   access .c, and take its address all in the same statement */        
char *c = &(struct{char c;}){'a'}.c;

And for the duration of the containing block, *c will equal 'a'.

However the terser and more common way of obtaining an address to a literal using compound literals is simply to declare an array literal with only one element, which will decay to a pointer as usual on assignment:

char *c = (char[]){'a'};

And this is fairly typical syntax for the job. But as it turns out, the language allows us to do something even more direct and slightly unintuitive: we can declare a compound literal of a scalar type. Which reduces everything above to the more obvious:

char *c = &(char){'a'};

In your case,

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char const* argv[])
{
    char *str[3];
    str[1] = &(char){'a'};
    return 0;
}

It's a little more verbose than '&' and in fact only a few keys less than assigning a temp variable, but there it is.

Answer 3

The problem is that the address of operator only works on names .

char character = 'a';
str[1] = &character;

should work just fine.

The reason why &'a' doesn't work is because there is no guarantee that a value even has an address. It may be loaded directly from the code pages into the register, in which case it is not in reference-able memory, or at least doesn't lie in the memory that you should be dereferencing.

Answer 4

The first snippet is working fine as in that you are taking the address of the variable.

In the second code snippet:-

str[1] = &'a'; 

This is not the correct way. 'a' isn't a variable. and address operator of operator works on names. If you want this to work then change it like:-

 char c = 'a';
 str[1] = &c;

Answer 5

As Jonathan said, you can only take the address of a variable. Under the covers, that 'a' is really just a short integer (ASCII value of 'a'). So, it's the same as why you can't do this:

str[1] = &9;