I am attempting a program using C++ that prints text to a terminal in different colors.

I have the following code which features the Color class nested into the letter_template typedef, further nested into an array of 100 letter_template’s:

class Color
{
private:
    char contents[6];
public:
    Color() {
        short prepend = COLOR_PREPEND;
        sprintf(contents, "%s[%dm", (char *)prepend, 0);
    }
    Color(int code) {
        short prepend = COLOR_PREPEND;
        sprintf(contents, "%s[%dm", (char *)prepend, code);
    }
};

typedef struct {
    Color *set;
    char c;
    Color *reset;
} letter_template;

letter_template essay[100];

int main() {
    // Initialize array
    for (int i = 0; i < sizeof(essay)/sizeof(essay[0]); i++) {
        essay[i].set = new Color(); essay[i].reset = new Color();
    }

    return 0;
}

The segfault occurs on the first loop of the for loop, and using a debugger I noticed that the contents of every member of “essay” had null values (0x0) for both the “set” and “reset” attributes, so I guess it couldn’t initialize the Color objects. I cannot figure out why though.

At first what I was really trying to do was to have one long contiguous string of data in the order of color sequence > letter > color sequence > repeat, I know that what I have coded will not be exactly that, however I am at a loss for why it shouldn’t be working at least.

I am stumped because my Color class definition as you see it worked just fine before I put it into the class and typedef structure (as in, the sprintf statement as you see it worked fine when I just had it written in main). My “contents” attribute has 6 bytes which I know is enough space for what I am sprintf-ing there.