Saving structures that contain pointers to a file

[BlaX]

Hello, I would like to know if there is an efficient way to store data of structures that contain pointers, by using fwrite.

	

struct names{
		
		char *first;
		char *last;
	};
		
	struct user_data{
		
		struct names handle;
		char *address;
	};

As an example the code stated above.
Thank you

[Adak]

I'm confused. Why not write it out to a file?

[BlaX]

You can't just simply write what is in those structres in a file.
The pointers that are there, are pointed to strings, where they only hold the address of the beginnings of the string.
By writing out the whole structure with fwrite, you will be writing just the address of the string.

[nadroj]

You could either manually write all of the fields yourself (thus defining the format of the binary file), or use existing libraries. A quick search brought up this link, though of course there are others.