Splitting chars into array of char pointers - c++

Question

I'm trying to split up a line of 80 characters of input into an array where each element points to a string of chars. Essentially, turn a char a[80] like "Hello world!" into a char* b[64] where b[0] points to "Hello" and b[1] points to "world!"
Basically, what strsep() would allow me with the following code:
while((cmd->argv[argc++] = strsep(clPtr, WHITESPACE)) != NULL);
I would like to know how I would go about modifying this code:
int parse(char* comm, char** commarray) {
int count = 0;
char word[80] = "";
char ch[2] = {' ', '\0'};
if(strlen(comm) == 0) {
commarray[0] = "NULL";
return 0;
}
for(size_t i = 0; i < strlen(comm); i++) {
int c = int(comm[i]);
if(!isspace(c)) {
ch[0] = comm[i];
strcat(word, ch);
if(i == (strlen(comm) - 1)) {
commarray[count] = word;
cout << commarray[count] << endl;
count++;
}
}
else if(isspace(c) && word != "") {
commarray[count] = word;
cout << commarray[count] << endl;
word[0] = '\0';
count++;
}
}
return 1;
}
//main
int main() {
char command[80];
char* args[64];
while(true) {
cout << "order>";
cin.getline(command, 80);
if(strcmp(command, "quit") == 0 || strcmp(command, "exit") == 0) {
break;
}
parse(command, args);
cout << args[0] << endl;
if(strcmp(args[0], "quit") == 0 || strcmp(args[0], "exit") == 0) {
break;
}
/*for(int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
cout << args[i] << endl;
}*/
}
return 0;
}
The variable args in the main() does not display what the variable commarray does in parse(). Instead, I get gibberish. Why is this? I thought passing an array was by default a pass by reference? For commarray, I get the appropriate array of pointers to strings (I think). For args, I get nothing usable.

Answer 1

Pointer hell is where you are at. I can see at least two fundamental problems with the code, but there's possibly more.
1) You reuse word for all your assignments to commarray. So you end up with all the pointers in commarray pointing at the same word array. Obviously that cannot work.
2) When you have exited the parse function the word array is no longer in scope, so it becomes invalid memory. So you have all your args array pointers pointing at the same piece of invalid (hence garbage) memory.
My advice, stop using pointers, start using C++, namely the std::string class, which will behave much more logically and intuitively than any pointer would.