Pointers with C programming

November 19 2022

Pointer is a very important topic in Structural programming. It exists in many programming languages like C, C++, Go, etc.

# Pointer in C Programming

Pointers are powerful features of C and C++ programming. Before we learn pointers, let’s learn about addresses in C programming.

Table of Contents:

Address in C
C Pointers

# Address in C Programming

If you have a variable var in your program, &var will give you its address in the memory. We have used address numerous times while using the scanf() function.

int var; // our variable
scanf("%d", &var); // &var is the address of our variable

The value entered by a user is stored in the address of our var variable. Now, let’s see an example

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
  int var = 7;
  printf("var is now = %d\n", var); // prints: var is now = 7

  // using & before our vaiable name to access its address
  printf("Address of var = %p", &var); // prints: Address of var = 2756778

  return 0;
}

Output :=>

var is now = 7
Address of var = 2756778

# Pointers in C

Pointers (pointer variables) are special variables that are used to store addresses rather than values.

Pointer Syntax :=>

int* p; // p is a pointer variable which stores a memory address value

Let’s assign address to our pointer vaiable

int* p; // pointer variable
int num; // normallly int variable
num = 7; // assigned int value 7
p = &num; // assigned num variable's address to p (pointer) variable

Now, we can access to num vaiable’s value using our pointer vaiable p without calling the num variable. Let’s see the magic!

prinf("Value of Num = %d", *p); // calling pointed variable value using pointer

Value of Num = 7

Now, you can see. We didn’t call the num variable. But We got that value using our pointer variable’s access *p. Which allowed us to get the value of pointed variable by its address lookup.

There are more to describ and talk about the pointer and its use cases in programming. But we will make another article on that. For now, try to understand and get started with this.

— Thank you.