C - Array is not working when copying files from text file

Question

For some reason when I copy words from a file to an array, the last element is replacing all the contents from the previous indexes; however, I tested that the array is working fine before going throught the 'file loop' by adding text to index 0 and 1. Please take a look:

FILE *file = fopen("words.txt", "r");
 if (file == NULL){
    printf("...\n");
    return false;
 }

char *words[172805];

//Array test
words[0] = "abc";
words[1] = "bcde";
printf("%s, %s\n", words[0], words[1]);

// Copy words in text document to 'words' array.
while (!feof(file)) {
    if (fgets(arraywordindic, 15, file) != NULL) {
        //Remove \n from word in arraywordindic
        arraywordindic[strcspn(arraywordindic, "\n")] = '\0';
        words[i] = arraywordindic;
        printf("%s\n", words[i]);
        i++;
        if (i == 4) {break;}
    }
}

for (i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
    printf("%s, ", words[i]);
}

fclose(file);

The output of above code is:

abc bcde

A

AA

AAH

AAHED

AAHED, AAHED, AAHED, AAHED,

Do you happen to know why this is happening? Thank you.

Answer 1

It looks like you're setting pointers to exactly the same buffer over and over. You need to copy the strings, or in other words:

words[i] = strdup(arraywordindic);

In C when you say char* x = y this does not copy the contents of that string, it copies the pointer to the string .