Defining structures in C language

A structure is a user-defined data type in the C programming language that enables us to put together data objects of various data kinds under a single name. A more ordered and practical way to express a complicated data type is through structures.

Basic syntax of structure:

struct structure_name {
   data_type1 member1;
   data_type2 member2;
   ...
   data_typen membern;
};

Example:

struct person {
   char name[50];
   int age;
   char address[100];
};

In the above example, we have defined a structure named person with three members: name, age, and address. The name and address members are character arrays of size 50 and 100, respectively, and the age member is an integer.

Once a structure is defined, we can declare variables of that structure type, just like any other data type:

struct person p1, p2;

We can then access the members of the structure using the dot (.) operator:

strcpy(p1.name, "John");
p1.age = 30;
strcpy(p1.address, "123 Main St");

In the above example, we have assigned values to the name, age, and address members of the p1 variable of the person structure type using the strcpy and assignment operators.

Example:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

struct person {
   char name[50];
   int age;
   float salary;
};

int main() {
   struct person p1;

   // Assigning values to structure members
   strcpy(p1.name, "John");
   p1.age = 32;
   p1.salary = 5000.50;

   // Printing structure members
   printf("Name: %s\n", p1.name);
   printf("Age: %d\n", p1.age);
   printf("Salary: %f\n", p1.salary);

   return 0;
}

Output:

Name: John
Age: 32
Salary: 5000.500000
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