PSPS
UNIT - 4
GMR Institute of Technology
Dr.Balajee Maram,
PhD,ME,MBA,MCJ
Associate Professor/CSE
GMRIT
Why files are needed?
• When a program is terminated, the entire data is
lost. Storing in a file will preserve your data even if
the program terminates.
• If you have to enter a large number of data, it will
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take a lot of time to enter them all. However, if you
have a file containing all the data, you can easily
access the contents of the file using a few
commands in C.
• You can easily move your data from one computer
to another without any changes.
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Types of Files
1. Text files
• Text files are the normal .txt files. You can easily
create text files using any simple text editors such
as Notepad.
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• When you open those files, you'll see all the
contents within the file as plain text. You can easily
edit or delete the contents.
• They take minimum effort to maintain, are easily
readable, and provide the least security and takes
bigger storage space.
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2. Binary files
• Binary files are mostly the .bin files in your
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computer.
• Instead of storing data in plain text, they
store it in the binary form (0's and 1's).
• They can hold a higher amount of data,
are not readable easily, and provides
better security than text files.
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File opening modes in C
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As given above, if you want to perform operations on
a binary file, then you have to append ‘b’ at the last.
For example, instead of “w”, you have to use “wb”,
instead of “a+” you have to use “a+b”. For performing
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the operations on the file, a special pointer called File
pointer is used which is declared as
FILE *filePointer;
So, the file can be opened as
filePointer = fopen(“fileName.txt”, “w”)
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Functions for file handling
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How to Create a File
Whenever you want to work with a file, the first step is to create a
file. A file is nothing but space in a memory where data is stored.
To create a file in a 'C' program following syntax is used,
FILE *fp;
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fp = fopen ("file_name", "mode");
In the above syntax, the file is a data structure which is defined in
the standard library. fopen is a standard function which is used to
open a file.
If the file is not present on the system, then it is created and then
opened.
If a file is already present on the system, then it is directly opened
using this function.
fp is a file pointer which points to the type file.
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Writing to a file
• In C, when you write to a file, newline characters '\n' must be
explicitly added.
The stdio library offers the necessary functions to write to a file:
• fputc(char, file_pointer): It writes a character to the file
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pointed to by file_pointer.
• fputs(str, file_pointer): It writes a string to the file pointed to
by file_pointer.
• fprintf(file_pointer, str, variable_lists): It prints a string to
the file pointed to by file_pointer. The string can optionally
include format specifiers and a list of variables variable_lists.
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fputc() Function
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
int i;
FILE * fptr;
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char fn[50];
char str[] = "GMRIT is good\n";
fptr = fopen("fputc_test.txt", "w"); // "w" defines "writing mode"
for (i = 0; str[i] != '\n'; i++) {
/* write to file using fputc() function */
fputc(str[i], fptr);
}
fclose(fptr);
return 0;
} 10
fputs () Function
#include <stdio.h>
Void main() {
FILE * fp;
fp = fopen("fputs_test.txt", "w+");
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fputs("This is Files Tutorial on fputs,", fp);
fputs("We don't need to use for loop\n", fp);
fputs("Easier than fputc function\n", fp);
fclose(fp);
}
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fprintf()Function
void main (void)
{
FILE *fileName;
fileName = fopen("anything.txt","r");
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fprintf(fileName, "%s %s %d", "Welcome", "to", 2018);
fclose(fileName);
}
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Reading data from a File
• fgetc(file_pointer): It returns the next character from the
file pointed to by the file pointer. When the end of the file
has been reached, the EOF is sent back.
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• fgets(buffer, n, file_pointer): It reads n-1 characters from
the file and stores the string in a buffer in which the NULL
character '\0' is appended as the last character.
• fscanf(file_pointer, conversion_specifiers,
variable_adresses): It is used to parse and analyze data.
It reads characters from the file and assigns the input to a
list of variable pointers variable_adresses using conversion
specifiers. Keep in mind that as with scanf, fscanf stops
reading a string when space or newline is encountered.
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fscanf()
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fgets()
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Getc()
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Fclose()
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Fwrite()
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Fwrite()
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fread()
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fseek()
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Example on fseek()
#include <stdio.h>
void main(){
FILE *fp;
fp = fopen("myfile.txt","w+");
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fputs("This is Ravi", fp);
fseek( fp, 7, SEEK_SET );
fputs(“Rama", fp);
fclose(fp);
}
Output: This is Rama
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