Strange values on a 2-d integer C array

Question

I know this is probably a very simplistic fix, but I have spent an hour googling and trying to fix it to no avail. This is the code in the beginning of main. Nothing else manipulates the graph[][] array. Its very simple C code. I am trying to initialize a 2-d integer array, and set all values to 0. But Later values end up being strange, random numbers. I know this happens when you don't initialize every value. BUT I am, and I ran through GDB and confirmed that it went through my test 4X4 array and initialized everything to 0. I am stumped.

printgrapharray is just a double for loop to go through every slot...

code:

#include <stdio.h>

#define inputarraylength 200
#define MAXVERTICES 100

void printgrapharray(int graph[][MAXVERTICES], int vertamount);

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{

    int numvert = 1;
    char edges[inputarraylength];
    char vertices[inputarraylength];

    freopen("input.txt", "r", stdin);

    scanf("V={%[^}]s", vertices);

    printf("\nVERTICES\n");
    printf("%s\n", vertices);            //comma-seperated list of names

    for (int i = 0; i < inputarraylength; i++) {

        if (vertices[i] == ','){

            numvert++;                          //get number of vertices
        }
    }
    const char *verts[numvert];         //create vertice array

    printf("numvert: %d\n", numvert);

    int graph[numvert][numvert];                    //create n*n matrix array

    for (int k = 0; k < numvert; k++) {
        for (int z = 0; z < numvert; z++) {

            graph[k][z] = 0;                            //init the graph 2-d array slots to 0
        }
    }
    printgrapharray(graph, numvert);
}

output:

VERTICES
Aa, Bbb, Cccc, Ddddd
numvert: 4

ADJACENCY MATRIX!
0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 
1562140139 32767 1562140159 32767 
774977075 1163132977 1398754642 1230197573 

Answer 1

You declare the printgrapharray function like

void printgrapharray(int graph[][MAXVERTICES], int vertamount);

which means the argument graph is a pointer to arrays of MAXVERTICES integers.

When you call the function you pass the main local variable graph to it, which will decay to a pointer to arrays of numgraph integers. Unless MAXVERTICES and numgraph are equal, you have a mismatch in the types, and that will lead to undefined behavior .

This problem is something the compiler should have detected, and given you a warning about.

---

There is actually a simple solution to this, because C has variable-length arrays: Use the argument vertamount in the declaration of the graph argument:

void printgrapharray(int vertamount, int graph[][vertamount]);

Note that the order of the arguments had to be switched, because vertamount must be declared before it is used.