Note for Programming in C - C By Suman Kumar Acharya
- Programming in C - C
- Note
- 338 Views
- 3 Offline Downloads
- Uploaded 1 year ago
Text from page-1
Pointers Pointers in C are easy and fun to learn. Some C programming tasks are performed more easily with pointers, and other tasks, such as dynamic memory allocation, cannot be performed without using pointers. So it becomes necessary to learn pointers to become a perfect C programmer. Let's start learning them in simple and easy steps. As you know, every variable is a memory location and every memory location has its address defined which can be accessed using ampersand (&) operator, which denotes an address in memory. Consider the following example, which prints the address of the variables defined − #include <stdio.h> int main () { int var1; char var2[10]; printf("Address of var1 variable: %x\n", &var1 ); printf("Address of var2 variable: %x\n", &var2 ); return 0; } When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result − Address of var1 variable: bff5a400 Address of var2 variable: bff5a3f6 What are Pointers? A pointer is a variable whose value is the address of another variable, i.e., direct address of the memory location. Like any variable or constant, you must declare a pointer before using it to store any variable address. The general form of a pointer variable declaration is − type *var-name; Here, type is the pointer's base type; it must be a valid C data type and var-name is the name of the pointer variable. The asterisk * used to declare a pointer is the same asterisk used for multiplication. However, in this statement the asterisk is being used to designate a variable as a pointer. Take a look at some of the valid pointer declarations − int *ip; /* pointer to an integer */ double *dp; /* pointer to a double */ float *fp; /* pointer to a float */
Text from page-2
char *ch /* pointer to a character */ The actual data type of the value of all pointers, whether integer, float, character, or otherwise, is the same, a long hexadecimal number that represents a memory address. The only difference between pointers of different data types is the data type of the variable or constant that the pointer points to. How to Use Pointers? There are a few important operations, which we will do with the help of pointers very frequently. (a) We define a pointer variable, (b) assign the address of a variable to a pointer and (c) finally access the value at the address available in the pointer variable. This is done by using unary operator * that returns the value of the variable located at the address specified by its operand. The following example makes use of these operations − #include <stdio.h> int main () { int var = 20; /* actual variable declaration */ int *ip; /* pointer variable declaration */ ip = &var; /* store address of var in pointer variable*/ printf("Address of var variable: %x\n", &var ); /* address stored in pointer variable */ printf("Address stored in ip variable: %x\n", ip ); /* access the value using the pointer */ printf("Value of *ip variable: %d\n", *ip ); return 0; } When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result − Address of var variable: bffd8b3c Address stored in ip variable: bffd8b3c Value of *ip variable: 20 NULL Pointers
Text from page-3
It is always a good practice to assign a NULL value to a pointer variable in case you do not have an exact address to be assigned. This is done at the time of variable declaration. A pointer that is assigned NULL is called a null pointer. The NULL pointer is a constant with a value of zero defined in several standard libraries. Consider the following program − #include <stdio.h> int main () { int *ptr = NULL; printf("The value of ptr is : %x\n", ptr ); return 0; } When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result − The value of ptr is 0 In most of the operating systems, programs are not permitted to access memory at address 0 because that memory is reserved by the operating system. However, the memory address 0 has special significance; it signals that the pointer is not intended to point to an accessible memory location. But by convention, if a pointer contains the null (zero) value, it is assumed to point to nothing. To check for a null pointer, you can use an 'if' statement as follows − if(ptr) /* succeeds if p is not null */ if(!ptr) /* succeeds if p is null */ Pointers in Detail Pointers have many but easy concepts and they are very important to C programming. The following important pointer concepts should be clear to any C programmer – C - Pointer arithmetic A pointer in c is an address, which is a numeric value. Therefore, you can perform arithmetic operations on a pointer just as you can on a numeric value. There are four arithmetic operators that can be used on pointers: ++, --, +, and To understand pointer arithmetic, let us consider that ptr is an integer pointer which points to the address 1000. Assuming 32-bit integers, let us perform the following arithmetic operation on the pointer −
Text from page-4
ptr++ After the above operation, the ptr will point to the location 1004 because each time ptr is incremented, it will point to the next integer location which is 4 bytes next to the current location. This operation will move the pointer to the next memory location without impacting the actual value at the memory location. If ptr points to a character whose address is 1000, then the above operation will point to the location 1001 because the next character will be available at 1001. Incrementing a Pointer We prefer using a pointer in our program instead of an array because the variable pointer can be incremented, unlike the array name which cannot be incremented because it is a constant pointer. The following program increments the variable pointer to access each succeeding element of the array − #include <stdio.h> const int MAX = 3; int main () { int var[] = {10, 100, 200}; int i, *ptr; /* let us have array address in pointer */ ptr = var; for ( i = 0; i < MAX; i++) { printf("Address of var[%d] = %x\n", i, ptr ); printf("Value of var[%d] = %d\n", i, *ptr ); /* move to the next location */ ptr++; } return 0; } When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result − Address of var[0] = bf882b30
Leave your Comments