Until recently, I have been using the following method to reserve memory for structs:

ITEM item[10];
ITEM* pitem[10];
pitem[0] = &item[0];
pitem[1] = &item[1];
...ect

This has been working fine, but I thought that using malloc might be preferable, so I changed it to:

ITEM* pitem[10];
pitem[0] = malloc(sizeof(ITEM));
pitem[1] = malloc(sizeof(ITEM));
...ect

However when I made this change, all the instances where I used a comparison with NULL, the program crashed. For example:

if (pitem[0]->member != NULL)
{
pitem[0]->member = member_001;
}

I've gone through the code again and again, using breakpoints and monitering variables and I'm fairly certain that the code only crashes when it comes to a NULL comparison. So, I was wondering if I should just go back to my old method or if I am using malloc wrong?
Thanks in advance!

malloc() delivers uninitialized memory. Thus your NULL comparision won't work. You need to explicitely set the memory to zero, using memset.

Thanks! That did the trick. So my code now looks like this:

pitem[0] = malloc(sizeof(ITEM));
memset (pitem[0], 0, sizeof(ITEM));

Is this the best way to initialize arrays of struct pointers?