CSE 06131223  CSE 06131224

Structured Programming
Lecture 23
File Management in C (1)

Prepared by________________________________
Md. Mijanur Rahman, Prof. Dr.
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University, Bangladesh
www.mijanrahman.com
 Contents
File Management in C
• Introduction
• Why do we need File Handling in C?
• Types of Files in C
• C File Operations
• File Pointer in C
• Functions for File Handling
• Defining and Opening a File
• Closing a File
• I/O Operations on Files
• Reading from a File
• Writing to a File
• Error Handling during File Operations
Pointers in C 2
 Introduction
• File handing in C is the process in which we create, open, read, write, and close
operations on a file.
• C language provides different functions such as fopen(), fwrite(), fread(), fseek(),
fprintf(), etc. to perform input, output, and many different C file operations in our
program.
• So far the operations using the C program are done on a prompt/terminal which is not
stored anywhere. The output is deleted when the program is closed.
• But in the software industry, most programs are written to store the information fetched
from the program. The use of file handling is exactly what the situation calls for.

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 Why do we need File Handling in C?
• In order to understand why file handling is important, let us look at a few features of
using files:
• Reusability: The data stored in the file can be accessed, updated, and deleted anywhere and anytime
providing high reusability.
• Portability: Without losing any data, files can be transferred to another in the computer system. The
risk of flawed coding is minimized with this feature.
• Efficient: A large amount of input may be required for some programs. File handling allows you to
easily access a part of a file using few instructions which saves a lot of time and reduces the chance of
errors.
• Storage Capacity: Files allow you to store a large amount of data without having to worry about
storing everything simultaneously in a program.

Functions in C 4
 Types of Files in C
• A file can be classified into two types based on the way the file stores the data. They are
as follows:
• Text Files
• Binary Files

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 Types of Files in C
• Text Files: A text file contains data in the form of ASCII characters and is generally used
to store a stream of characters.
• Each line in a text file ends with a new line character (‘\n’).
• It can be read or written by any text editor.
• They are generally stored with .txt file extension.
• Text files can also be used to store the source code.

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 Types of Files in C
• Binary Files: A binary file contains data in binary form (i.e. 0’s and 1’s) instead of ASCII
characters. They contain data that is stored in a similar manner to how it is stored in the
main memory.
• The binary files can be created only from within a program and their contents can
only be read by a program.
• More secure as they are not easily readable.
• They are generally stored with .bin file extension.

Functions in C 7
 C File Operations
• C file operations refer to the different possible operations that we can perform on a file
in C such as:
• Creating a new file – fopen() with attributes as “a” or “a+” or “w” or “w+”
• Opening an existing file – fopen()
• Reading from file – fscanf() or fgets()
• Writing to a file – fprintf() or fputs()
• Moving to a specific location in a file – fseek(), rewind()
• Closing a file – fclose()

Functions in C 8
 File Pointer in C
• A file pointer is a reference to a particular position in the opened file. It is used in file
handling to perform all file operations such as read, write, close, etc.
• We use the FILE macro to declare the file pointer variable. The FILE macro is defined
inside <stdio.h> header file.

• Syntax of File Pointer

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 Functions for File Handling
• There are many functions in the C library to
open, read, write, search and close the file.
A list of file functions are given below:

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 Defining and Opening a File
• We must open a file before it can be read, write, or update. The fopen() function is used
to open a file. The syntax of the fopen() is given below.
FILE* fopen(const char *file_name, const char *access_mode);
• Parameters:
• file_name: name of the file when present in the same directory as the source file. Otherwise, full
path.
• access_mode: Specifies for what operation the file is being opened.
• Return Value:
• If the file is opened successfully, returns a file pointer to it.
• If the file is not opened, then returns NULL.

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 Defining and Opening a File
• File opening modes in C: File opening
modes or access modes specify the
allowed operations on the file to be
opened. They are passed as an argument
to the fopen() function.

• Some of the commonly used file access

Functions in C 12
 Defining and Opening a File
• The fopen function works in the following way.
• Firstly, It searches the file to be opened.
• Then, it loads the file from the disk and place it into the buffer. The buffer is used
to provide efficiency for the read operations.
• It sets up a character pointer which points to the first character of the file.

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 Defining and Opening a File
• Example of Opening a File:

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 Creating a File in C
• The fopen() function can not only open a file but also can create a file if it does not
exist already.
• For that, we have to use the modes that allow the creation of a file if not found such as
w, w+, wb, wb+, a, a+, ab, and ab+.

• The syntax for creating a file in C:

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 Creating a File in C
• Example of Creating a File:

Functions in C 16
 Closing a File
• The fclose() function is used to close the file. After successful file operations, you must always
close a file to remove it from the memory.
• Syntax of fclose():
fclose(file_pointer);
• where the file_pointer is the pointer to the opened file.
• For Example:
FILE *fptr ;
fptr= fopen(“fileName.txt”, “w”);
---------- Some file Operations -------
fclose(fptr);

Functions in C 17
?
Pointers in C
THE END
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