বিভিন্ন ধরণের Data Items

Submitted by tushar pramanick on Mon, 01/02/2012 - 16:23

 In Chapter 12, "Storing Similar Data Items," you learned how to store data of the same type into arrays. In this hour, you'll learn to use structures to collect data items that have different data types. The following topics are covered in this lesson:

    Declaring and defining structures
    Referencing structure members
    Structures and pointers
    Structures and functions
    Arrays of structures



Summary

  •     You can group variables of different types with a data type called a structure.
  •     The data items in a structure are called fields or members of the structure.
  •     The struct keyword is used to start a structure declaration or a structure variable definition.
  •     The dot operator (.) is used to separate a structure name and a member name in referencing the structure member.
  •     The arrow operator (->) is commonly used to reference a structure member with a pointer.
  •     A structure can be passed to a function, and a function can return a structure back to the caller.
  •     Passing a function with a pointer that points to a structure is more efficient than passing the function with the entire structure.
  •     Arrays of structures are permitted in C.
  •     You can enclose a structure within another structure. The latter is called a nested structure.
  •     It's legal to put a pointer into a structure even though the pointer may point to another structure that has not been declared yet.
     

Related Items

Using the Precision Specifier

Using the Precision Specifier

Aligning Output

Aligning Output
As you might have noticed in the previous section, all output is right-justified. In other words, by default, all output is placed on the right edge of the field, as long as the field width is longer than the width of the output.

 

Adding the Minimum Field Width

Adding the Minimum Field Width

Converting to Hex Numbers

Converting to Hex Numbers

Revisiting the printf() Function

Revisiting the printf() Function

The printf() function is the first C library function you used in this book to print out messages on the screen. printf() is a very important function in C, so it's worth it to spend more time on it.