How to allocate and deallocate heap memory for 2D array?

There's no standard resizable array type in C. You have to implement it yourself, or use a third-party library. Here's a simple bare-bones example:

typedef struct int_array
{
    int *array;
    size_t length;
    size_t capacity;
} int_array;

void int_array_init(int_array *array)
{
    array->array = NULL;
    array->length = 0;
    array->capacity = 0;
}

void int_array_free(int_array *array)
{
    free(array->array);
    array->array = NULL;
    array->length = 0;
    array->capacity = 0;
}

void int_array_push_back(int_array *array, int value)
{
    if(array->length == array->capacity)
    {
        // Not enough space, reallocate.  Also, watch out for overflow.
        int new_capacity = array->capacity * 2;
        if(new_capacity > array->capacity && new_capacity < SIZE_T_MAX / sizeof(int))
        {
            int *new_array = realloc(array->array, new_capacity * sizeof(int));
            if(new_array != NULL)
            {
               array->array = new_array;
               array->capacity = new_capacity;
            }
            else
                ; // Handle out-of-memory
        }
        else
            ; // Handle overflow error
    }

    // Now that we have space, add the value to the array
    array->array[array->length] = value;
    array->length++;
}

Use it like this:

int_array a;
int_array_init(&a);

int i;
for(i = 0; i < 10; i++)
    int_array_push_back(&a, i);
for(i = 0; i < a.length; i++)
    printf("a[%d] = %d\n", i, a.array[i]);

int_array_free(&a);

Of course, this is only for an array of ints. Since C doesn't have templates, you'd have to either put all of this code in a macro for each different type of array (or use a different preprocessor such as GNU m4). Or, you could use a generic array container that either used void* pointers (requiring all array elements to be malloc'ed) or opaque memory blobs, which would require a cast with every element access and a memcpy for every element get/set.

In any case, it's not pretty. Two-dimensional arrays are even uglier.

Instead of an array here, you could also use a linked list, The code is simpler, but the allocation is more frequent and may suffer from fragmentation.

As long as you don't plan to do much random access (Which is O(n) here), iteration is about as simple as a regular array.

typedef struct Line Line;
struct Line{
    char text[LINE_MAX];
    Line *next;
};

Line *mkline()
{
    Line *l = malloc(sizeof(Line));
    if(!l)
       error();
    return l;
}

main()
{
    Line *lines = mkline();
    Line *lp = lines;
    while(fgets(lp->text, sizeof lp->text, stdin)!=NULL){
         lp->next = mkline();
         lp = lp->next;
    }
    lp->next = NULL;
}

To dynamically allocate a 2D array:

char **p;
int i, dim1, dim2;


/* Allocate the first dimension, which is actually a pointer to pointer to char   */
p = malloc (sizeof (char *) * dim1);

/* Then allocate each of the pointers allocated in previous step arrays of pointer to chars
 * within each of these arrays are chars
 */
for (i = 0; i < dim1; i++)
  {
    *(p + i) = malloc (sizeof (char) * dim2);
   /* or p[i] =  malloc (sizeof (char) * dim2); */
  }

 /* Do work */

/* Deallocate the allocated array. Start deallocation from the lowest level.
 * that is in the reverse order of which we did the allocation
 */
for (i = 0; i < dim1; i++)
{
  free (p[i]);
}
free (p);

Modify the above method. When you need another line to be added do *(p + i) = malloc (sizeof (char) * dim2); and update i. In this case you need to predict the max numbers of lines in the file which is indicated by the dim1 variable, for which we allocate the p array first time. This will only allocate the (sizeof (int *) * dim1) bytes, thus much better option than char p[dim1][dim2] (in c99).

There is another way i think. Allocate arrays in blocks and chain them when there is an overflow.

struct _lines {
   char **line;
   int n;
   struct _lines *next;
} *file;

file = malloc (sizeof (struct _lines));
file->line = malloc (sizeof (char *) * LINE_MAX);
file->n = 0;
head = file;

After this the first block is ready to use. When you need to insert a line just do:

/* get line into buffer */
file.line[n] = malloc (sizeof (char) * (strlen (buffer) + 1));
n++;

When n is LINE_MAX allocate another block and link it to this one.

struct _lines *temp;

temp = malloc (sizeof (struct _lines));
temp->line = malloc (sizeof (char *) * LINE_MAX);
temp->n = 0;
file->next = temp;
file = file->next;

Something like this.

When one block's n becomes 0, deallocate it, and update the current block pointer file to the previous one. You can either traverse from beginning single linked list and traverse from the start or use double links.