Working with Structs

This lesson covers bundling data with struct in C, so you can handle several related pieces of data as one unit. It's for anyone searching "C struct usage."

Define a struct with struct. C has no classes, but a struct lets you bundle related data together — like "an animal's name" and "the sound it makes" — as one unit.

The example defines two fields, name and sound, in struct Animal, creates an instance with struct Animal dog = {"Dog", "Woof"}, and accesses it with dog.name.

A common early mistake is the fixed array size. You need to decide the reserved memory size ahead of time, like char name[16], and a string longer than that can't be assigned.

In real projects, structs are used widely wherever you want to handle related data together — coordinate data, configuration settings, and more.

📖 Reference code

#include <stdio.h>

struct Animal {
    char name[16];
    char sound[16];
};

int main(void) {
    struct Animal dog = {"Dog", "Woof"};
    printf("%s says \"%s\"\n", dog.name, dog.sound);
    return 0;
}

✍️ Your code

Type your code, then press "Run"

🧪 This site can't compile or run C directly, so it checks on the spot whether what you typed matches the reference code (scoring happens entirely in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere).