I have a packet from a server which is parsed in an embedded system. I need to parse it in a very efficient way, avoiding memory issues, like overlapping, corrupting my memory and others variables. The packet has this structure "String A:String B:String C". As example, here the packet received is compounded of three parts separated using a separator ":", all these parts must be accesibles from an structure. Which is the most efficient and safe way to do this. A.- Creating an structure with attributes (partA, PartB PartC) sized with a criteria based on avoid exceed this sized from the source of the packet, and attaching also an index with the length of each part in a way to avoid extracting garbage, this part length indicator could be less or equal to 300 (ie: part B). typedef struct parsedPacket_struct { char partA[2];int len_partA; char partB[300];int len_partB; char partC[2];int len_partC; }parsedPacket; The problem here is that I am wasting memory, because each structure should copy the packet content to each the structure, is there a way to only save the base address of each part and still using the len_partX.