-129. A Zig Zag Array

Task Description

Prepare a two dimensional zig-zag array using a free buffer and a pointer array. Note that the numbers of columns in rows of a zig-zag array may be different. The ingredients of a zig-zag array are as follow.

• An integer row that indicates the number of rows of this two dimensional array.
• An integer array column[] that specifies the number of columns in that row.
• An integer buffer, int buffer[10000]; which will be sufficient to hold all elements.
• An array of integer pointers. int *array[]; This array has the number of row elements.

Now you need to implement the following function, so that after calling prepare_array, we can use array[i][j] to access the elements in this prepared two dimensional zig-zag array.

void prepare_array(int buffer[], int *array[], int row, int column[]);

We will test your function using a code segment like the following.

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#include <stdio.h>
#include "prepare_array.h"
 
int main() {
    int row = 4;
    int column[4] = {10, 20, 30, 10};
    int *array[50];
    int buffer[10000];
    prepare_array(buffer, array, row, column);
    for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
     for (int j = 0; j < column[i]; j++)
       array[i][j] = i * 100 + j;
    return 0;
}

Hint

If we properly set array[i] to point to a cell in buffer, array[i][j] will be the j-th cell from this location.