C what is a pointer

Explore C Examples. C Pass Addresses and Pointers. Access Array Elements Using Pointer. C Dynamic Memory Allocation. C Array and Pointer Examples. C Pointers In this tutorial, you'll learn about pointers; what pointers are, how do you use them and the common mistakes you might face when working with them with the help of examples.

We have used address numerous times while using the scanf function. C Pointers Pointers pointer variables are special variables that are used to store addresses rather than values. Pointer Syntax Here is how we can declare pointers. You can also declare pointers in these ways. Assigning addresses to Pointers Let's take an example. Table of Contents What is a pointer? Previous Tutorial:. Next Tutorial:. Share on:. Next Topic C Pointer to Pointer. Reinforcement Learning. R Programming.

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Company Questions. Artificial Intelligence. Cloud Computing. Data Science. Angular 7. Machine Learning. Data Structures. Operating System. Computer Network. Compiler Design. Computer Organization. A pointer is essentially a simple integer variable which holds a memory address that points to a value, instead of holding the actual value itself.

The computer's memory is a sequential store of data, and a pointer points to a specific part of the memory. Our program can use pointers in such a way that the pointers point to a large amount of memory - depending on how much we decide to read from that point on. If we try to access the name variable as an array, it will work, and will return the ordinal value of the character J , since the name variable actually points exactly to the beginning of the string.

Dereferencing is the act of referring to where the pointer points, instead of the memory address. We are already using dereferencing in arrays - but we just didn't know it yet. The brackets operator - [0] for example, accesses the first item of the array. And since arrays are actually pointers, accessing the first item in the array is the same as dereferencing a pointer.