How to Initialize multidimensional array with zeros in C++

By Himanshu Sharma

In this tutorial, we will learn to initialize the multidimensional array with zeros in C++. There are multiple approaches to do this task. Two of them are given below:

First Approach: using assignment operator

We can use the assignment operator to assign the value to zero as described in the below code.

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
    int array[10][10] = {0}; // initialize all the elments to zero
    for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
        for(int j = 0; j < 10; j++) {
            cout << array[i][j] << " ";
        }
        cout << endl;
    }
}

Output:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Second Approach: using memset STD

We can also use std::memset to initialize all the elements of 2D array.

To use std::memset, we have to include the header file named “#include<cstring>“.

The implementation is given below:

#include<iostream>
#include<cstring>
using namespace std;
int main() {
    int arr[3][3];
    memset( arr, 0, sizeof(arr) ); // initialize all the elments to zero
    for(int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
        for(int j = 0; j < 3; j++) {
            cout << arr[i][j] << " ";
        }
        cout << endl;
    }
}

Output:

0 0 0 
0 0 0
0 0 0

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