Looping through a null-terminated array of strings of unknown size

Sometimes, it is inconvenient to either state or compute the size of an array of some type of objects. That being the case, we must use a termination marker; usually a NULL or 0. For example, suppose we have a fixed array of strings, which we terminate with 0:

char *epics[] = {"AZN", "BOGUS", "ULVR", "VOD", 0} ;

The question is: how do we loop over that array? It can be quite difficult to work out the pointer arithmetic. The answer looks like this:

  char **epic = epics;
  while(*epic) {
    puts(*epic);
    epic++;
  }
  puts("Finished");

In this example, all we are doing is printing the string to stdout. You are likely to want to do something more complicated. This will produce the output:

AZN
BOGUS
ULVR
VOD
Finished

I hope that helps.