Structures and Unions Chapter 6

Structure A structure is an aggregate data type  Composed of two or more related variables called member/field/element struct tag-name{ type member1; type member2; type member3;. type memberN; } variable-list;

Structure Contd. struct point{ int x; int y; }; Tag-name and variable-list are optional but one of them must present Structure can be initialized strcut point pt = {20, 30}; Member can be accessed via. operator struct point pt; pt.x = 20; pt.y = 30;

Array of Structures stuct student{ long id; char name[20]; char dept; }; struct student s[100];

Array of Structures Contd. stuct { int id; char name[20]; char dept[4]; } s[100]; scanf(“%d”, &s[0].id); scanf(“%s”, s[0].name); scanf(“%s”, s[0].dept);

Nested Structures struct careof{ char houseno[20]; int roadno; char location[80]; char phone[20]; }; struct student_info{ int id; char name[80]; struct careof address; }s;

Nested Structures Contd. Accessing the nested structure scanf(“%s”, s.address.houseno); scanf(“%d”, &s.address.roadno);

Union union is a single piece of memory that is shared by two or more variables union tag-name{ type member1; type member2; type member3;. type memberN; } variable-list;

Union Contd. union u_type{ int i; char c[2]; float d; }sample; 1234 d c[0]c[1] i

Suppose that a constant may be an int, a float, or a char struct { char name[20]; int utype; union u_tag{ int ival; float fval; char cval; }u; }symtab[MAX];

Structure: Bit-fields So far we cannot access at bit level Bit-fields are useful when you want to pack information into the smallest possible space struct b_type{ unsigned dept: 3; unsigned stock: 2; }var_list;

Structure: Bit-fields Contd. The members are all either integer or unsigned integer  For integer the left most bit will be regarded as sign bit Can be assigned values confirming its limit A field may overlap a word boundary is implementation-defined Fields may not be named (: and width) used for padding Processor architecture dependent

File I/O Chapter 9 Teach Yourself by Herbert Schildt

Understanding Streams Stream: the C I/O system supplies a consistent interface to the programmer for device I/O files  A level of abstraction  A logical interface File: actual device providing I/O is called a file

Standard Streams stdin stdout stderr

Types of Stream Two types  Text  Binary Text file  Contains ASCII characters  Some character translation  So, no one-to-one correspondence between what is sent to the stream and what is written to the file Binary file  May be used with any type of data  No character translation  So there is one-to-one correspondence

How to open a file? FILE *fopen (char *filename, char *mode); Stdio.h Filename  path Mode  “r”, “w”, “a”, “rb”, “ab”, “r+”  Consequence of those modes

How to close a file? Int fclose (FILE *fp); In order to improve efficiency most file system write data to disk one sector at a time Fclose flushes the buffer

How to know it is the end of file? Int feof (FILE *fp); Int ferror (FILE *fp);

How to read and write a character? Int fgetc (FILE *fp); Int fputc (int ch, FILE *fp); And more on this later

An example: reading a text file and displaying it in the screen FILE *fp; if ((fp = fopen (“a.txt”, “r”))==NULL){ //error and exit } while (! feof (fp)){ putchar (fgetc(fp)); } fclose (fp);

Writing and reading strings and others Int fputs (char *str, FILE *fp); Int fgets (char *str, int num, FILE *fp); Int fprintf (FILE *fp, format speci, variable(s)); Int fscanf (FILE *fp, format speci, address(es));

How to read/write in binary mode? size_t fread (void *buffer, size_t size, size_t num, FILE *fp); size_t fwrite (void *buffer, size_t size, size_t num, FILE *fp); size_t: defined in stdio.h unsigned long Void pointer: pointer of any data types

An example: reading a text file and displaying it in the screen FILE *fp; char ch; if ((fp = fopen (“a.txt”, “rb”))==NULL){ //error and exit } while (! feof (fp)){ fread(&ch, sizeof (char), 1); putchar (ch); } fclose (fp);

Writing an entire array double d[10] = {10.2, 20.3,….}; fwrite (d, sizeof d, 1, fp); //entire fread (d, sizeof (double), 5, fp); //only first five elements

Random Access So far, we have seen write and read sequentially  Beginning to end Using another function we can access any point in a file  Used only in binary mode (one-to-one) int fseek (FILE *fp, long offset, int origin);

Origins are SEEK_SET//seek from the start of file SEEK_CUR//seek from current location SEEK_END//seek from end of file long ftell (FILE *fp);

Example: copy a file into another in reverse order FILE *in, *out; char ch; long loc; fseek(in, 0L, SEEK_END); loc = ftell(in); loc = loc -1; //skip the end marker while (loc >= 0){ fseek(in, loc, SEEK_SET); ch = fgetc(in); fputc(ch, out); loc--; }

Example?? 10 double numbers are written in a file User want to access any number