Arrow Membership Operator

[informrefer]

The line pfish->kind = "guppy" produces an error statement: "invalid array assignment." Why does this happen when I'm assigning the address of the first char element ('g') to the array of chars in the structure pointed to by pfish?

  struct fish 
    {
        char kind[6];
        int weight;
        double length;
    };
    fish* pfish = new fish;
    pfish->kind = "guppy";
    cout << pfish->kind <<"\n";

[LB]

You cannot assign to a character array. I recommend using std::string instead, but if you can't, use strcpy or use a character pointer instead of a character array.

Since you named it "kind", I may also suggest looking into OOP and Polymorphism, or else using an enum instead of a string.

[informrefer]

How is it different from:

char kind[6] = "guppy";

(which works fine)?

[LB]

char kind[6] = "guppy"; is an initialization.

char kind[6];
kind = "guppy";

This is an assignment after initialization.

The fact that you can use = for initialization is a quirk of the language - it does not have the same meaning as assignment.