CODEWITHSUNDEEP
carrayspointersstruct
beti
beti

Reputation: 13

Pointer to table of struct in C

I don't understand some piece of code in C, and couldn't find any similar question, so I hope you'll help me. I have a struct table defined like this:

struct my_struct {
  struct other_struct some_struct[N];
  char some_char;
  ..
} my_struct[N];

In another function:

struct my_struct *ms;

And then is the part I don't understand:

ms = &my_struct[0];

How can I interpret this line?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3259

Answers (1)

user2736738
user2736738

Reputation: 30926

ms is a pointer to the struct my_struct. It contains address of a struct my_struct variable. Here we assign to ms the already declared struct my_struct array's (also name my_struct) 0-th element's address.

& - address of operator. Which basically returns the address of a variable.

Now you can access my_struct[0] via ms.

Equivalently

ms->some_char = 'A' is same as my_struct[0].some_char='A'. To give a small example I can simplify this way.

struct a{
  int z;
};

struct a array[10]; // array of 10 `struct a`

struct a* ptr = &array[0]; // ptr contains the address of array[0].

Now we can access array[0] via pointer ptr.

And ms is just a pointer to struct not pointer to a table of struct as you have mentioned in the question heading.

Upvotes: 2

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