C File Processing

Objectives To be able to create, write and update files. To become familiar with sequential access file processing. To become familiar with random-access file processing.

Date Hierarchy Tom Green Judy Smith Stan Miller Randy Walter File Randy Walter Record Randy Field Byte (ASCII Character R) 1 Bit

C’s View of a File of n-bytes n-1 eof Each file will be accompanied with three streams when being executed. They are: stadin, stdout and stderr. Standard library then provides many functions for reading data from files and writing data to files. Such as: fgets read one char from a file. ( fgetc(stdin) then get from the Standard input=getchar ( ) ) Similarly, fscanf and fprintf will handle file input and output.

Creating a Sequential File C impose no structure on a file. Thus, notions like a record of a file do not exist as part of the C language. The programmer must provide any file structure to meet the requirements of each particular application. Example: week10 cfile.c

File Open Modes Mode Description r open a file for reading w open a file for writing a Append r+ open a file for update (r & w) w+ Create a file for update a+ Append; open or create a file for update; writing is done at the end of the file. ** w and w+ will discard the existing file.

Open an Existing File Example: /week10/copen.c fscanf( cfPtr, “%d%s%lf”, &account, name, &balance);

More Example Credit inquiry program. week10 credit.c rewind ( cfPtr)

Random-Access Files Normally, they have fixed –length records for individual records. May be accessed directly (and thus quickly) without searching through other records. Main applications: Airline reservation system, banking system, point-of-sale system and other kinds of transaction processing systems that require rapid access to specific data.

Functions Used in Such Files 1. fwrite – transfers a specified number of bytes beginning at a specified location in memory to a file. fwrite ( &number, sizeof( int ), 1, fPtr ) Will write 4-bytes from variable number to the file represented by fPtr. 2. fread --

Example Create a credit processing system capable of storing up to 100 fixed-length records. Each record should consists of an account number that will be used as the record key, a last name, a first name and a balance. The first program—create the random file. c-RandF.c

Program Remark The statement of fwrite( &blankClient, sizeof(struct clientsData), 1, cfPtr ); Causes the structure blankClient of sizeof( struct clientsData ) to be written to the file pointed by cfPtr. *** sizeof is a compile-time unary operator that returns an unsigned integer. *** sizeof is not a function and it will not generate the execution-time overhead of a function call.