c - Post-increment on a dereferenced pointer?

Question

Trying to understand the behaviour of pointers in C, I was a little surprised by the following (example code below):

#include <stdio.h>

void add_one_v1(int *our_var_ptr)
{
    *our_var_ptr = *our_var_ptr +1;
}

void add_one_v2(int *our_var_ptr)
{
    *our_var_ptr++;
}

int main()
{
    int testvar;

    testvar = 63;
    add_one_v1(&(testvar));         /* Try first version of the function */
    printf("%d
", testvar);        /* Prints out 64                     */
    printf("@ %p

", &(testvar));

    testvar = 63;
    add_one_v2(&(testvar));         /* Try first version of the function */
    printf("%d
", testvar);        /* Prints 63 ?                       */
    printf("@ %p
", &(testvar));   /* Address remains identical         */
}

Output:

64
@ 0xbf84c6b0

63
@ 0xbf84c6b0

What exactly does the *our_var_ptr++ statement in the second function (add_one_v2) do since it's clearly not the same as *our_var_ptr = *our_var_ptr +1?

Answer 1

This is one of those little gotcha's that make C and C++ so much fun. If you want to bend your brain, figure out this one:

while (*dst++ = *src++) ;

It's a string copy. The pointers keep getting incremented until a character with a value of zero is copied. Once you know why this trick works, you'll never forget how ++ works on pointers again.

P.S. You can always override the operator order with parentheses. The following will increment the value pointed at, rather than the pointer itself:

(*our_var_ptr)++;