Crash. Problem possibly with wrong usage of Arrays or String code.

[Hordeon]

Hi. I'm trying to make a program that helps you to learn foreign language words faster. By asking you them. This is only the beginning part of it, but yet it crashes. I don't really know what's the problem, I'm very bad with arrays at the moment, I don't even know if I used the right codes for program like this one.

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
    cout << "Welcome. You are using F-Words Helper tool which was create to help you\n learn your foreign language words!" << endl;
    cout << "\nProgram written by: Rokas Paulikas in 2013-10-02" << endl;

    int total, i;

    cout << "\nHow much different words do you want to learn?" << endl; cin >> total;
    string word[total]; // how big your array will be?
    for(i = 1; i <= total; i++){
         cout << "Enter word " << i << ":" << endl;
         cin >> word[i];
    }

    cout << "You are retarded" << endl;
    return 0;
}

Also don't mind the last sentence, I was just testing if it would not crash if the program executed one more line of code at the end of it. Thanks.

[booradley60]

First of all, I'm not sure how this compiles without "total" being some kind of compile-time constant. Regardless, you're running your for loop from 1 to total, when it should run from 0 to (total-1). Think of what would happen on the last iteration of the loop if you were essentially saying cin >> word[total]; That's out of the bounds of your array.

[giblit]

Also you can not create arrays like that. You must declare the size of an array before compile time. Another method would be to use a dynamic array like

string *words = nullptr;

//get the amount of words

words = new string[size];

//when you are done remember to delete it
delete[] words;
//if you use new[] you must use delete[] 

[ne555]

Or simply std::vector< std::string > words(size);