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Determine the size of an array in C

David Y.

The Problem

How can I determine the size of and number of elements in an array in C?

The Solution

We can use the C sizeof operator to discover the size of expressions and data types in bytes. Using sizeof on an array will return the array’s size in bytes, as below:

size_t array_size = sizeof(my_array);

The size_t type is used for sizes returned by sizeof.

To get the number of elements in our array, we need to divide this value by the size of a single element. Being of the same type, all elements in a C array will also be of the same length, so we can use the first element (my_array[0]) to do this:

size_t list_length = sizeof(my_array) / sizeof(my_array[0]);

In the background, size_t is an unsigned integer or unsigned long. Therefore, unless the size of our array is greater than INT_MAX, we can safely declare list_length as an int:

int list_length = sizeof(my_array) / sizeof(my_array[0]);

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