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NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2024 07:06:43 +0000
From: Mark Summerfield <mark@qtrac.eu>
Subject: is it possible to point to a slice of an array without malloc or
 VLAs?
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
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I'm using getopt_long() to process a command line.
So after a typical call I might have:

argv == {"./efind", "-D", "-x", "one", "two", "three", "four"}
optind == 3

What I'd like to do (without copying or mallocing and without using a VLA)
is to get a pointer to a slice of argv, specifically,
{"one", "two", "three", "four"}.
In Python terms argv[optind:argc].

Is this possible in C?

At the moment I store argv, optind, and argc and handle the slice using a loop:

if (config->optind < config->argc)
    for (int i = config->optind; i < config.argc; ++i)
        process(config->argv[i]);

This works fine, so really I'm just wondering if there's a nicer way.