Learn C Fundamentals/

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Passing Pointers to Struct

Passing Pointers to Struct

Take a look at a couple of ways that are used for handling structs using pointers.

We'll cover the following...

Pointer to a struct

Pointers can also be used to point to a struct. Here is how this would be done:

C
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
typedef struct {
  int year;
  int month;
  int day;
} date;
int main(void) {
  date *today;
  today = malloc(sizeof(date));
  // the explicit way of accessing fields of our struct
  (*today).day = 21;
  (*today).month = 5;
  (*today).year = 2024;
  // the more readable shorthand way of doing it
  today->day = 21;
  today->month = 5;
  today->year = 2024;
  printf("The date is %d/%d/%d\n", today->day, today->month, today->year);
  free(today);
  return 0;
}

Here’s a visualization of the code:

Variables declared in main are allocated on the stack before it is invoked
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Variables declared in main are allocated on the stack before it is invoked

Refer to the slides above while we go through this example step by step.

  • On lines 4–8, we define a struct type ...