Program to demonstrate Address of Operator in C Language (&)

Introduction:

We have looked at the introduction to pointers in an earlier post. In today’s article, We will look at the address of operator in c programming language with example programs.

Address of Operator in C Language (‘&’):

The address of operator in C programming language is used to get the memory address of a variable.

As we know, each variable is stored at a specific memory address. We can use the address of operator to get that memory address.

The address of operator is denoted by using the ampersand & character. It is a unary operator, which means it operates on a single operand.

Syntax of Address of Operator (&):

In order to get the memory address of a variable, Place the address of operator(ampersand &) before the variable name.

Example of Address of Operator usage:

Here is how we can use the address of operator to get the memory address of any variable

We can get the marks variable address by using the address of the operator like &marks.

Also note that The address of a variable can only be stored in the pointer variable. So we used the integer pointer variable ptr to store the address of the marks variable.

Here is the graphical representation of how address of operator (&) works in C programming language.

As we can see from the above image, The ptr variable is storing the address of marks variable, which we got using the address of operator(&)

Let’s look at an example program to understand the address of operator in the c programming language.

Program to understand the address of operator(‘&’) in C Language

Program Output:

Let’s compile and Run the program using your favorite IDE. We are using the GCC compiler to run the program on Ubuntu Linux.

$ gcc address-of-operator-program.c

The above command will create an executable file named a.out in the current working directory ( present directory). Run the executable file using the following command from your terminal.

Address of Operator program explanation:

In the above program, We created an integer variable called marks and initialized it with the value 70

As we discussed earlier, The address of operator is used to get the memory address of a variable but inorder to store the memory address of variable, We need a pointer variable, So declare a pointer variable ptr to hold the address of the marks variable.

Then, we used the address of operator (&) operator to get the address of marks (&marks) and stored it in ptr variable.

ptr = &marks;

Finally, We displayed the values and address of the marks and ptr variable. which confirms the pointer variable is storing the address of the marks variable. i.e 0x7fff89f35f0c. This way we can simply get the address of a variable using the Address of operator (&) in C programming language.

Few Quick Notes on the Address of Operator in C ( & ):

There are a few caveats to using the address of operator, let’s look at them.

The address of Operator(&) can’t be used with constants or an expression.

For example,

1) We can’t use the address of operator on Constants like an integer constant.

The above example is invalid. As we are trying to get the address of an integer constant.

2) Similarly, We can’t use the address of operator on the expression. Please have a look at the following example.

Here we are using the address of operator on (i+j) expression, Which is Invalid and raises an error: lvalue required as unary ‘&’ operand

So we can’t use the address of operator on the expressions.

3) Use the address of operator with the appropriate variables and the elements of the arrays, strings, structures, etc.

Here the iPtr is a integer pointer variable, Which can store the address of the variable i.

Conclusion:

We have looked at the Address of Operator in C language (&) in C with an Example program. In the next tutorial, We will look at the dereference operator or indirection operator in C language.

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