In which situation should we prefer a void pointer over a char pointer or vice-versa?
As a matter of fact both can be type cast to any of the data types.
3 Answers
A void pointer is a pointer to "any type", and it needs to be converted to a pointer to an actual type before it may be dereferenced.
A pointer to char is a pointer to char, that happens to have the property that you could also access (parts of) other types through it.
You should use void * when the meaning is intended to be "any type" (or one of several types, etc). You should use char * when you access either a char (obviously), or the individual bytes of another type as raw bytes.
void pointers are used when the type of the variable the pointer would refer to is unknown. For example the malloc() function returns a void pointer referencing to the allocated memory. You could then cast the pointer to other data types.
There might be instances when you need to create a pointer to just store the address. You could use a void pointer there.
Its more about code readability and structure, I dont wanna see a function need input for lets say pointer to struct and get it via char* , the first thing that comes to my mind if I see char* is a string(in pure c term, array of chars, null terminated), on the other hand with void* I am warned that something general is going to be passed, a good example is qsort function.
so its not all about wether it works or compiles, it should be readable too,
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