CONCEPT OF STRUCTURES AND UNIONS IN C

Structures & Unions

STRUCTURE is a user-defined data type in C language which allows us to combine data of different types together. Structure helps to construct a complex data type which is more meaningful.

Unions are user-defined data type in C, which is used to store a collection of different kinds of data, just like a structure. However, with unions, you can only store information in one field at any one time. Unions are like structures except it used less memory.The keyword union is used to declare the structure in C. Variables inside the union are called members of the union.

To clear your concepts you can follow these steps...

Step 1: Visit this article to clear your basic theory

Step 2: Visit this article to deep-dive into Queue

Visit this article to clear your concept about ARRAY OF STRUCTURES.

Similarities between Structure and Union

1. Both are user-defined data types used to store data of different types as a single unit.
2. Their members can be objects of any type, including other structures and unions or arrays. A member can also consist of a bit field.
3. Both structures and unions support only assignment = and sizeof operators. The two structures or unions in the assignment must have the same members and member types.
4. A structure or a union can be passed by value to functions and returned by value by functions. The argument must have the same type as the function parameter. A structure or union is passed by value just like a scalar variable as a corresponding parameter.
5. ‘.’ operator is used for accessing members.

Differences

1. Introduction to Structures in C

2. Declaring a Structure variable

        

3. Initializing and accessing Structure members                           

4. Pointer to Structure variables                 

                     

5. Introduction to Unions                         

             

5. Applications of Unions                         

             

Problem Set

1. Write a C program to read and print an employee's detail using structure (Solution)

2. Write a C program to add two distances in feet and inches using structure (Solution)

3. Write a C program to extract individual bytes from an unsigned int using union (Solution)

4. Write a C program for passing structures as function arguments and returning a structure from a function (Solution)

5. Calculate party expenses using C program

This C program can be used to read item details used in party and calculate all expenses, divide expenses in all friends equally.

This program will read item name, price, quantity and calculate amount (price*quantity), using this program maximum 50 items can be read and calculate the total paid amount. (I think 50 items are enough for a party, it’s a joke actually. You can change the maximum number of items according to party items. (Solution)

6. Write a C program to store the information a students using structure (Solution)

7. Write a program to add two distances (Inch-Feet system) using structures (Solution)

8. Write a C program to add two complex numbers using Structures (Solution)