what does -> mean in C?

[nite owl]

Hi just looking through some tutorials and came across this symbol:



->

just wondering what it means, thanks.

[yabbadabbadont]

It is used when you have a pointer to a structure and you want to dereference one of the stuct's fields.


typedef struct
{
char a;
int b;
} mystruct;

mystruct example;
mystruct *ptr;

ptr = &example;

ptr->a = 'A';
ptr->b = 1;

(*ptr).a = 'B';
(*ptr).b = 2;

[hod139]

In case it isn't clear from yabbadabbadont's post, the
"->" syntax is syntactic sugar for "(*ptr)." .


ptr->
(*ptr).


are equivalent, where the former was introduced strictly for convenience.