Accessing Members of a Structure

Each member of a structure can be used just like a normal variable, but its name will be a bit longer. To return to the examples above, member name of structure st_rec will behave just like a normal array of char, however we refer to it by the name


  st_rec.name

Here the dot is an operator which selects a member from a structure.

Where we have a pointer to a structure we could dereference the pointer and then use dot as a member selector. This method is a little clumsy to type. Since selecting a member from a structure pointer happens frequently, it has its own operator -> which acts as follows. Assume that st_ptr is a pointer to a structure of type student We would refer to the name member as


  st_ptr -> name

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