Segment fault while reading a string into a char* array

Question

I am trying to read some strings and then print them into a matrix form.

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    char *buffer[BUFFER_SIZE];
    for(size_t i = 0; i < BUFFER_SIZE; i++)
    {
        scanf("%s",buffer[i]);  /**This line is causing segment fault **/
    }

    for(size_t i = 0; i < BUFFER_SIZE; i++)
    {
        for(size_t j = 0; j < strnlen(buffer[i], MAX); j++ )
        {
            printf("%c ",buffer[i][j]);
        }
        printf("\n");
    }

}

Any suggestion what I am missing here?

Answer 1

char *buffer[BUFFER_SIZE] is an array of character pointers. The way your code is now, buffer[i] is a char * that is uninitialized at the time you scanf("%s",buffer[i]) . You need to allocate memory ( malloc , perhaps) for scanf to store the string of characters prior to this point.