Character pointer

All concepts are similar to the integer pointer. If you are directly reading this article, kindly go through the integer pointer topic before getting started with this.

A character pointer only stores an address of a character variable.

Syntax

char *ptr;

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Referencing and dereferencing of a character pointer

Example

#include<stdio.h>

int main()
{
    char var = 'a',*ptr;

    ptr = &var;   //ptr references var

    printf("Address of var = %x\n",&var);
    printf("ptr is pointing to an address  %x\n",ptr);

    /* use '*' operator to access the value stored at ptr,
       i.e. dereferencing ptr */
    printf("Value stored at ptr = %c",*ptr);

    return 0;
}

Output

For the sake of understanding better, let's assume the address of a variable var.

If we assume address of a variable var as 1024 then the output of the above program will be,

Address of var = 1024
ptr is pointing to an address  1024
Value stored at ptr = a