Structures

Learn about structures in C.

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Key Concepts

Review core concepts you need to learn to master this subject

Defining Structures With struct

Initializing Structures With struct

Custom Data Types With Structures

Grouping Data Types With Structures

Accessing Member Variables With Dot Notation

Structure Member Variables

Structure Type Pointers

Accessing Member Variables With Arrow Notiation

Defining Structures With `struct`

// `struct` keyword and structure name
struct Person{
  // uninitialized member variables
  char* name;
  int age;
};

Structures are defined with the struct keyword followed by the structure name. Inside the braces, member variables are declared but not initialized. The given code block defines a structure named Person with declared member variables name and age.

Structures: Lesson

Lesson 1 of 1

1
Introduction
Throughout this course, we have defined many different variable types like, int and char. These are known as the basic types and are built-in to C. We’ve also defined data types like arrays and p…
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2
Defining Structures
To help us understand how to include structures (also called structs) in our code, let’s look at how to define them: ![Structure components, the keyword struct, the name Bottle and member variable…
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3
Initializing Structures
Now that we know how to define structures, let’s take a look at how we can use them in our code. struct Bottle { char* name; int maxCapacity; int currentCapacity; }; struct Bottle bottle1 = …
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4
Why Use Structures
Let’s now take a step back and discuss why we would want to use structures. Look at an example of a program that uses bottle data without structures. char bottleName1[] = “Medium Bottle”; int maxC…
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5
Structure Dot Notation
Now that we’ve leveraged that power of structures to package variables together we can discuss how we can access each member variable individually using dot notation. Dot notation is a C operato…
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6
Structure Pointers
Similar to other derived types, like arrays and strings, structures can use a lot of memory. Imagine a structure with multiple strings each able to hold hundreds of characters. One way to manage …
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7
Structures in Functions
Let’s wrap up by using structures with functions. We can specify structures and pointers to structures as parameters to functions: void myFunction(struct Bottle b, struct Bottle* bPointer) When p…
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8
Summary
Great job learning about structures! We’ve covered many important topics: - Structures allow you to create user-defined data types - Structures can package together other data types into one type -…
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