CSE 1102

Structure and
Union
What is Structure
a ‘book’ is a collection of things such as title, author, call number,
publisher, number of pages, date of publication, etc
all this data is dissimilar
author is a string, whereas number of pages is an integer

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What is Structure
For dealing with such collections, C provides a data type called
‘structure’
A structure gathers together, different atoms of information that
comprise a given entity
We have seen earlier how ordinary variables can hold one piece of
information
how arrays can hold a number of pieces of information of the same
data type

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What is Structure
These two data types can handle a great variety of situations
But quite often we deal with entities that are collection of dissimilar
data types

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What is structure
to store data about a book. You might want to store
1. its name (a string)
2. its price (a float)
3. number of pages in it (an int)

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What is Structure
we can follow two approaches
1. Construct individual arrays, one for storing names, another for
storing prices and still another for storing number of pages.
2. Use a structure variable.

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What is structure
Let us examine these two approaches one by one

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Making things with Arrays

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Making things with Structures

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Declaration of Structure and
Structure Variables

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Declaration of Structure and
Structure Variables
The general format of structure definition is:

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Declaration of Structure and
Structure Variables
In can be also written as--

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Initializing Structure Variables

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Accessing Structure Elements

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Accessing Structure Elements

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Array of Structures

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Copying structure elements (Piece-
meal copying vs Copying as a whole)

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Nested Structures

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Passing structure variables

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Passing structure variables

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Structure Pointers

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Call by reference with structures

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User-Defined Data Types
(typedef)

where type refers to an existing data type (either a standard

data type, or previous user-defined data type), and new- type
refers to the new user-defined data type.
Example:
typedef int age;
age male, female;

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 User-Defined Data Types
(typedef)

where new- type is the user-defined

structure type. typedef struct students
{
char name[50];
char branch[50];
int ID_no;
} students;
students st;

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SELF-REFERENTIAL
STRUCTURES

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#include <stdio.h>

struct node {
int data1;
int data2;
struct node* link;
};

int main()
{
struct node ob1; // Node1

// Initialization
ob1.link = NULL;
ob1.data1 = 10;
ob1.data2 = 20;

struct node ob2; // Node2

// Initialization
ob2.link = NULL;
ob2.data1 = 30;
ob2.data2 = 40;

// Linking ob1 and ob2

ob1.link = &ob2;

// Accessing data members of ob2 using

ob1
printf("%d", ob1.link->data1);
printf("\n%d", ob1.link->data2);
return 0;
}

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Unions
Unions, like structures, contain members whose individual data types may
differ from one another
The members within a union all share the same storage area within the
computer’s memory, whereas each member within a structure is assigned its
own unique storage area.
They are useful for applications involving multiple members, where values
need not be assigned to all of the members at any one time.
The user must keep track of what type of information is stored at any given
time.
An attempt to access the wrong type of information will produce meaningless
results.
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Unions

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Unions

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References
•https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/structures-c/
•https://www.w3schools.com/c/c_structs.php
•https://www.programiz.com/c-programming/c-structures
•https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cprogramming/c_structures.htm
•https://www.javatpoint.com/structure-in-c

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