Pointer and Structure in C Language with Free Notes

Pointer and Structure

Similar to other type of Pointer, we can have a structure Pointer also. i.e. we can also point a pointer to a Structure. A pointer to a Structure variable can be declared by prefixing the variable name by ‘*’. Consider the following declaration,

struct abc
{
    int a;
    float b;
};
    struct abc x;  //Declare Structure variable x of type abc
    struct abd *ptr; //Declare a Pointer ptr to a variable of type abc

It can be shown as below in fig.

Once this declaration is made, we can assign the address of the structure variable x to the structure Pointer ptr by the following statement

ptr = &x;

Since ptr is a Pointer to the structure variable x, the member of the structure can also ne accessed through a special operator called arrow operator i.e. ‘->’ (minus sign followed by greater than sign).

Programming Notes PDF

For Example, the members a and b of the structure variable x pointed by ptr can be assigned value 10 and 75.75 respectively by the following statement:

ptr -> a = 10;
ptr -> b = 75.75;

The arrow operator ‘->’ is also known as Pointer to Member operator.