C Primer Plus®, Third Edition

Saving the Structure Contents in a File

Because structures can hold a wide variety of information, they are an important tool for constructing databases. For example, you could use a structure to hold all the pertinent information about an employee or an auto part. Ultimately, you would want to be able to save this information in, and retrieve it from, a file. A database file could contain an arbitrary number of such data objects. The entire set of information held in a structure is termed a record, and the individual items are fields. Let's investigate these topics.

What is perhaps the most obvious way to save a record is the least efficient way, and that is to use fprintf(). For example, recall the book structure introduced in Listing 14.1 ...