Warning I've never seen before

Posted by Greven on Wed 15 Oct 2003 05:36 PM — 7 posts, 23,286 views.

Greven Canada Wed 15 Oct 2003 05:36 PM #0

In a project I'm working on, I seem to have come across an warning I don't think I've seen before:

warning: passing arg 1 of `smash_space' discards qualifiers from pointer target type

The culprit is this line:

	    fprintf( fp, "%s.race\n", smash_space(race_table[count].race_name) );

My smash_space function is this:

char *smash_space( char *str ) 
{ 
static char ret[MAX_STRING_LENGTH]; 
char *retptr; 
retptr = ret; 
for ( ; *str != '\0'; str++ ) 
{ 
if (*str == ' ' ) 
continue;
else 
{ 
*retptr = *str; 
retptr++; 
} 
} 
*retptr = '\0'; 
return ret; 
}

Clearly, my compiler is complaining about the type of information being passed into the function. Any ideas on how I can resolve this warning? It works properly, but I hate having warnings in my code.

David Haley USA Wed 15 Oct 2003 05:49 PM #1

What's the type for race_name in the race_table struct?

Greven Canada Wed 15 Oct 2003 08:45 PM #2

char 	race_name	[16];

Greven Canada Wed 15 Oct 2003 09:04 PM #3

Well, apparently the problem is that my race_table is a const structure. Still, I dunno what I would do to fix it. Any ideas?

David Haley USA Wed 15 Oct 2003 09:50 PM #4

Change:
char *smash_space( char *str )
to:
char *smash_space( const char *str )

This is generally good practice anyways. If your function isn't going to modify the pointer passed as an argument, the pointer should be passed as const.

Greven Canada Wed 15 Oct 2003 11:10 PM #5

cleared it right up, thanks.

halkeye Canada Fri 17 Oct 2003 02:13 AM #6

Thats what i said! SEEESH