The spell editor gets round this by reading the spells into a temporary linked list of dynamically allocated spells_structs until it hits the end of the file. It then uses the highest spell number in the list to allocate the array which the spells are then copied into.
That lets you to have a dynamic number of spells along with the quick access of an array. That's how I did it anyway, you might be able to think of something a bit neater
K.