Copying value of char pointer array to char array

Question

This is for a simple game and I am trying to learn how to apply C++ in an existing project (that's how I learn best), I have experience programming in C# and other high level languages so it is quite new to me still. So I have this list of races:

const char* Races[] = {
   "Demon",
   "Human",
   "Elf",
   "Orc",
   "Aliens"
};

At one point I receive the registration of a user and a race is selected. I save away all the information of the user to a struct and I want to save the full name of the race to this struct as well.

struct User_t {
   unsigned int RaceID;
   char Race[16];
};

The following code is what I got to put the values inside the struct:

User_t User;

User.RaceID = 3;
strcpy(User.Race, Races[User.RaceID]);

This, however, does not work. This is part of a game and the exception handling is horrible (it basically crashes the game without any error visible). I am trying to figure out what I am doing wrong. Any suggestions, perhaps suggestions on other things as well?

Answer 1

I am trying to figure out what I am doing wrong. Any suggestions, perhaps suggestions on other things as well?

You are trying to use C++ as if it was C (which is possible syntactically), and you do not know C nor C++ well enough to do that.

Do yourself a favor and do it in real C++:

std::string Races[] = {
   "Demon",
   "Human",
   "Elf",
   "Orc",
   "Aliens"
};

struct User {
  unsigned int RaceID;
  std::string Race;

  explicit User(unsigned int rid)
  : RaceID(rid)
  , Race(Races[rid])
  {}
};

User user(3);

std::cout << user.Race << '\n';

Answer 2

I would suggest that you look in to enum class{} . It's easier to make your code less error-prone.

You could write your code like this:

enum class eRaces
{
    eDemon,
    eHuman,
    eElf,
    eOrc,
    eAlien,
};

struct User
{
    eRaces myRace;
};

User User;

User.myRace = eRaces::eElf;

Answer 3

Assuming that scope of Races array is global you can simply avoid copying it and just do something like this:

struct User_t {
   unsigned int RaceID;
   const char* Race;
};

User_t User;

User.RaceID = 3;
User.Race = Races[User.RaceID];

You can also use std::string as mentioned in comments but you wont avoid copying it. Since you develop game i think that performance has higher priority over objectivity of c++ language.