What is the purpose of a double pointer in the C language?

8 months ago

Noah Thompson

1 minute

A double pointer in C language is used to store a pointer to a pointer, also known as a pointer to a pointer. Its main purpose is to pass a pointer to a pointer in function calls, allowing the function to modify the content pointed to by the pointer. By using double pointers, it is possible to manipulate the memory area pointed to by a pointer, rather than the pointer itself. This technique is very common in dynamic memory allocation and the implementation of data structures such as linked lists.