Tutorials
- ASP.NET
- C#
- C++
- Java
- JavaScript
- MySQL
- PHP
- Ruby
- SQL
- VB.NET
Code
How To
News
Forums
Pictures
Videos
Icons
Newsgroups

Building a C# Chat Client and Server

A step by step tutorial teaching you how to create your own chat client and chat server easily in C#, for local networks or the Internet.

in C# Programming Tutorials

Getting Hard Drive Information

A C# tutorial showing you how to make use of WMI to extract information on disk drives, such as model, capacity, sectors and serial number.

in C# Programming Tutorials

UPS Shipping Calculator

This tutorial will teach you how to calculate the shipping cost based on the weight, height, length and depth of the box, the distance and the UPS service type.

in PHP Programming Tutorials

Create Your Own Rich Text Editor

Creating a Rich Text Editor using JavaScript is easier to do than you might think, thanks to the support of modern browsers; this tutorial will walk you through it.

in JavaScript Programming Tutorials

Tutorials

Programming Tutorials

ActionScript (5)
ASP (7)
ASP.NET (28)
Assembly (1)
C (6)
C# (132)
C++ (33)
CSS (6)
General (4)
HTML (6)
Java (28)
JavaScript (38)
MySQL (2)
Objective C (1)
Pascal (1)
PHP (61)
Python (3)
Ruby (18)
Silverlight (1)
SQL (8)
VB.NET (5)
Visual Basic (3)

IT Jobs

From CareerBuilder

Geekpedia » C++ Tutorials » Introducing Structs

Introducing Structs

A tutorial for beginners, offerring a look into C++ structures. How structures can be defined, created, accessed and what is their actual use. Includes example code.

On Wednesday, August 3rd 2005 at 02:09 PM

By Andrew Pociu (View Profile)

(Rated 4 with 5 votes)

Contextual Ads

More C++ Resources

Download this project

There are cases in which variables or arrays are not the best solution for storing data. Say we want to store information about the leaders of a community. For the sake of simplicity, let's suppose we only need their first name, last name and age. We can store all these in 3 variables, however since currently there are 4 leaders in this community we would need to define a total of 12 variables. There has to be a better way. Arrays, perhaps? Arrays can act as a container for multiple variables, so we can create 4 arrays, each with three fields. Wait, that's no good: arrays can only store one type of data, and we want to store the age as an integer, not as a string. Of course, the point of all this is to demonstrate that the best solution is structs.

Let's see how structures work. Below is the completed code which compiles (at least in Visual Studio 2003 as a Win32 Console Project).

#include "stdafx.h"

// We need this for the string data type

#include

// We need this for outputting text with cout

#include

using namespace std;

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])

{

   // Define the struct and its elements

   typedef struct

   {

      string FName;

      string SName;

      int Age;

   } MemberInfo;

// Create a new instance of the struct

MemberInfo MyMember;

   // Assign data to each struct member

   MyMember.FName = "Andrei";

   MyMember.SName = "Pociu";

   MyMember.Age = 19;

// Output the data stored

cout << MyMember.FName << " " << MyMember.SName << " is aged " << MyMember.Age << ".\n";

return 0;

}

The output of this code, is as your probably expect:

Andrei Pociu is aged 19.

Let's review. First using typedef we defined a structure named MemberInfo. This structure is composed of 3 elements/variables, two of them being of type string and one of type int. Now that we have the structure defined and we want to use it, we create an instance of it called MyMember. We can now set the values of the variables of MyMember. Then, just like we assigned values to the variables inside the structure, we retrieve them and display to the console windows.

This is a simple and clean object-oriented approach. You can continue the code above and create as many instance of MemberInfo as you want, each holding different data.

There are a few more advanced things to say about structures, but I wanted to keep this on a beginner level. That's all you need to know about structures as a C++ beginner.