C StructuresLesson 37Free preview

C Arrays of Structs

This lesson is part of C · All levels

Summary

An array of struct is a collection of data of the same type that is stored side by side in memory, so it is suitable for data such as a list of students or a collection of coordinates of dots. Each element is accessed with an array index and then followed by a dot operator, e.g. students[0].nama. This structure makes it easier to process data through a loop because all the elements are stored in one neat memory block.

Key points

Declared as a regular array, e.g. struct Side arr[10]; then each element contains one copy of the complete struct.
Access uses arr[i].field; if the data is through a pointer use ptr->field.
The total size of the array is equal to sizeof(struct) times the number of elements, so note also the padding between members.
It can be filled directly with a nested initializer like {{1,2},{3,4}}.
Loop for is most commonly used to process the entire struct element of an array.

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