Section 25.5 Structures and Pointers

When dealing with a pointer to a structure it can get pretty cumbersome to access a member of the structure being pointed to.

Suppose again that we have declared a structure as before:

struct student{
  char firstName[30];
  char lastName[30];
  int birthYear;
  double aveGrade;
};

Suppose furthermore that we have a pointer:

struct student * studentptr;

which points to a particular student’s record. In order to access a member (for example birthYear) of this student’s record via the pointer we first need to dereference the pointer (*studentptr) and then access the member via the direct member selection operator .:

(*studentptr).birthYear

The parentheses around (*studentptr) are important since without them the computer would attempt to execute the member selection operator first, which would make no sense, given that studentptr is not a structure but rather a pointer to a structure.

The indirect member selection operator -> combines these steps into one:

studentptr->birthYear

and therefore accomplishes the same thing as the above. Watch the video to find out more: