File handeling in c program

What is File in c program

 

A file is a collection of bytes stored on a secondary storage device, which is generally a disk of some kind. The collection of bytes may be interpreted, for example, as characetrs, words, lines, paragraphs and pages from a textual document; fields and records belonging to a database; or pixels from a graphical image. File handeling in any programming language is necessary to save user’s data in a permanent storage area. There are two kinds of files that programmers deal with text files and binary files.

Text file

Text file sometime called ASCII text file

A text file can be a stream of characters that a computer can process sequentially. It is not only processed sequentially but only in forward direction. For this reason a text file is usually opened for only one kind of operation (reading, writing, or appending) at any given time. Generally it deals with character.

Since text files only process characters, they can only read or write data one character at a time. (In C Programming Language, Functions are provided that deal with lines of text, but these still essentially process data one character at a time.) A text stream in C is a special kind of file. Depending on the requirements of the operating system, newline characters may be converted to or from carriage-return/linefeed combinations depending on whether data is being written to, or read from, the file. Other character conversions may also occur to satisfy the storage requirements of the operating system. These translations occur transparently and they occur because the programmer has signalled the intention to process a text file.

Binary file

A binary file is no different to a text file. It is a collection of bytes. In C Programming Language a byte and a character are equivalent. Hence a binary file is also referred to as a character stream, but there are two essential differences.

1. No special processing of the data occurs and each byte of data is transferred to or from the disk unprocessed.
2. C Programming Language places no constructs on the file, and it may be read from, or written to, in any manner chosen by the programmer.

Binary files can be either processed sequentially or, depending on the needs of the application, they can be processed using random access techniques. In C Programming Language, processing a file using random access techniques involves moving the current file position to an appropriate place in the file before reading or writing data. This indicates a second characteristic of binary files.
They a generally processed using read and write operations simultaneously.

For example, a database file will be created and processed as a binary file. A record update operation will involve locating the appropriate record, reading the record into memory, modifying it in some way, and finally writing the record back to disk at its appropriate location in the file. These kinds of operations are common to many binary files, but are rarely found in applications that process text files.

File handeling in c programming

Opening a file:

The general format of the function used for opening a file is
FILE *fp;
fp=fopen(“filename”,”mode”);

The first statement declares the variable fp as a pointer to the data type FILE. As stated earlier, File is a structure that is defined in the I/O Library. The second statement opens the file named filename and assigns an identifier to the FILE type pointer fp. fopen() contain the file name and mode (the purpose of opening the file).

r is used to open the file for read only.
w is used to open the file for writing only.
a is used to open the file for appending data to it.

 Closing a File

A file must be closed as soon as all operations on it have been completed. This would close the file associated with the file pointer. The input output library supports the function to close a file.

Syntax to close file

fclose(filepointer);

Example program for file handeling.Reading data from firstfile.txt file:-
#include
  void main(void)
   {
     FILE *myfile;
     char c;
     myfile = fopen("firstfile.txt", "r");
     if (myfile == NULL)

         printf("File doesn't exist\n");
     else {
             do {
                   c = getc(myfile);
                   putchar(c);
                  } while (c != EOF);
             }
    fclose(myfile);

   }