Types of Files in C
What are Files?
Large amounts of data are stored in files. C offers many file management features, including creating, opening, reading, writing to, and closing files. Relevant data is stored in the file, and C file handling is utilized to manipulate the data.
Why do we need files?
The complete set of data is lost when a program is stopped. If you save your data to a file and the software is blocked, your data will be preserved. If there are many of them, entering all the data will take a while.
- It takes some time to enter all the data if there are a lot of them.
- However, if you have a file with all the information, you may quickly obtain the data using a few C commands.
- Without making any changes, you can rapidly transfer your data from one computer to another.
- Any text editor can produce or modify these plain text files stored with the (.txt) extension. Text files store a stream of characters and data as ASCII characters.
- These are the most essential files with text that humans can read. The built-in I/O functions of C can be used to create, open, read from, and write to these objects.
- As opposed to ASCII characters, it is stored in binary format. Integer, float, and double data are typically stored in binary files. In this instance, data is saved as binary values (0s and 1s).
Binary Files
Binary files store data in binary format, including arrays, structures, floating-point numbers, and integers. Binary files can only be read from and written using low-level I/O operations like fread() and fwrite().
Differences Between Text Files and Binary Files
Using their ASCII values and in a format that is legible by humans, text files can hold data in the form of alphabets, numerals, and other special symbols.
- For instance, any file with the extensions. Txt,.c, etc. A binary file, on the other hand, is made up of a series or group of bytes that humans cannot read. For instance, files with the extensions.exe ,.mp3, etc. It stands for unique data.
- A minor error in a text file can be recognized and fixed. However, a little mistake in a binary file corrupts the file and is challenging to spot.
- The fact that humans cannot read the data increases the security of the material because someone who does not know the structure of the data may not be able to access it.
- There are three critical variations between the two in programming: how newlines are handled, how integers are stored, and how EOF (End of File) is represented.
- A header object file (.o file) is created by pre-compiling each.h header file with the corresponding.c file.
- Our main.c file first goes via the pre-processor before being compiled, after which the compiler converts it to assembler and produces the object file (main. o).
- The linker will then combine the main. o with the necessary header objects and libraries to produce program.exe, an executable file.
Source Files
Source files (.c) are human-readable files that, by convention, have names that finish in. c and contain function definitions and the whole program logic. The actual C source code can be found in these files. To produce executable files, they are compiled using a C compiler.
Header Files
These files include different pre-processor statements and function prototypes. They allow source code files to access externally defined functions, and customarily, they finish their names within quotation marks.
Header files, which have the. h extension frequently includes function prototypes, type definitions, macro definitions, and other declarations shared by numerous C source files. They are incorporated into source files using the #include directive.
Object Files
Object files (.o) are created during the compilation of source files by the C compiler. Although they are made up of binary function definitions, they cannot be carried out independently. By convention, the names of these files end in. o.
They hold data and programme code that have been compiled from a specific source file. The final executable file is then produced by linking together object files.
Executable Files
These files come with various extensions depending on the operating system they are running on, such as.exe on Windows or no extension on Unix/Linux. These are the results of the compilation and linking process, and they can be run to carry out a program.