strcat outputs garbage

Applications Programming
1

Anyone have any ideas why when using strcat function I would get some garbage at the beginning of the output string? what I'm doing is something like the following example.

Code:

char temp[32];
char tempHolder[32];

for(int i=0;i<something;i++){
sprintf(temp,"%u ", someVariable);
strcat(tempHolder,temp);
}

printf("%s\n",tempHolder);

Output:
Ao8@<the rest of my string prints after>

2

You need to initilaize your strings

char temp[32]={0x0};
char tempHolder[32]={0x0};

The reason strcat() "messes up" is because there were pre-existing garbage bytes on the stack where temp was allocated. strcat moved on past the garbage to the first '\0' byte to write the content of tempHolder.

3

awesome that worked thanks for the help Jim. I thought I had tried something similar to that but I guess I was doing it wrong.