Structured Data (cont)
Files of records can be produced by
- either,
write() ing chunks of bytes from struct objects
- or, printing formatted text representation of
struct data
The latter approach is a form of serialisation
For the write() approach:
- no need to worry about formatting issues
- writes entire structure, even if string buffers half empty
- can
lseek() to ith struct via i*sizeof(StructType)
For the printing approach:
- produces files that are human-readable
- only uses as many bytes as required from string buffers
- can access structures only sequentially (unless using padding)
|