How to find the 'sizeof' (a pointer pointing to an array)?

No, you can't. The compiler doesn't know what the pointer is pointing to. There are tricks, like ending the array with a known out-of-band value and then counting the size up until that value, but that's not using sizeof().

Another trick is the one mentioned by Zan, which is to stash the size somewhere. For example, if you're dynamically allocating the array, allocate a block one int bigger than the one you need, stash the size in the first int, and return ptr+1 as the pointer to the array. When you need the size, decrement the pointer and peek at the stashed value. Just remember to free the whole block starting from the beginning, and not just the array.

The answer is, "No."

What C programmers do is store the size of the array somewhere. It can be part of a structure, or the programmer can cheat a bit and malloc() more memory than requested in order to store a length value before the start of the array.

For dynamic arrays (malloc or C++ new) you need to store the size of the array as mentioned by others or perhaps build an array manager structure which handles add, remove, count, etc. Unfortunately C doesn't do this nearly as well as C++ since you basically have to build it for each different array type you are storing which is cumbersome if you have multiple types of arrays that you need to manage.

For static arrays, such as the one in your example, there is a common macro used to get the size, but it is not recommended as it does not check if the parameter is really a static array. The macro is used in real code though, e.g. in the Linux kernel headers although it may be slightly different than the one below:

#if !defined(ARRAY_SIZE)
    #define ARRAY_SIZE(x) (sizeof((x)) / sizeof((x)[0]))
#endif

int main()
{
    int days[] = {1,2,3,4,5};
    int *ptr = days;
    printf("%u\n", ARRAY_SIZE(days));
    printf("%u\n", sizeof(ptr));
    return 0;
}

You can google for reasons to be wary of macros like this. Be careful.

If possible, the C++ stdlib such as vector which is much safer and easier to use.

You can do something like this:

int days[] = { /*length:*/5, /*values:*/ 1,2,3,4,5 };
int *ptr = days + 1;
printf("array length: %u\n", ptr[-1]);
return 0;

This is how I personally do it in my code. I like to keep it as simple as possible while still able to get values that I need.

typedef struct intArr {
    int size;
    int* arr; 
} intArr_t;

int main() {
    intArr_t arr;
    arr.size = 6;
    arr.arr = (int*)malloc(sizeof(int) * arr.size);

    for (size_t i = 0; i < arr.size; i++) {
        arr.arr[i] = i * 10;
    }

    return 0;
}

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stddef.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#define array(type) struct { size_t size; type elem[0]; }

void *array_new(int esize, int ecnt)
{
    size_t *a = (size_t *)malloc(esize*ecnt+sizeof(size_t));
    if (a) *a = ecnt;
    return a;
}
#define array_new(type, count) array_new(sizeof(type),count)
#define array_delete free
#define array_foreach(type, e, arr) \
    for (type *e = (arr)->elem; e < (arr)->size + (arr)->elem; ++e)

int main(int argc, char const *argv[])
{
    array(int) *iarr = array_new(int, 10);
    array(float) *farr = array_new(float, 10);
    array(double) *darr = array_new(double, 10);
    array(char) *carr = array_new(char, 11);
    for (int i = 0; i < iarr->size; ++i) {
        iarr->elem[i] = i;
        farr->elem[i] = i*1.0f;
        darr->elem[i] = i*1.0;
        carr->elem[i] = i+'0';
    }
    array_foreach(int, e, iarr) {
        printf("%d ", *e);
    }
    array_foreach(float, e, farr) {
        printf("%.0f ", *e);
    }
    array_foreach(double, e, darr) {
        printf("%.0lf ", *e);
    }
    carr->elem[carr->size-1] = '\0';
    printf("%s\n", carr->elem);

    return 0;
}

Most implementations will have a function that tells you the reserved size for objects allocated with malloc() or calloc(), for example GNU has malloc_usable_size()

However, this will return the size of the reversed block, which can be larger than the value given to malloc()/realloc().

There is a popular macro, which you can define for finding number of elements in the array (Microsoft CRT even provides it OOB with name _countof):

#define countof(x) (sizeof(x)/sizeof((x)[0]))

Then you can write:

int my_array[] = { ... some elements ... };
printf("%zu", countof(my_array)); // 'z' is correct type specifier for size_t