Quote Originally Posted by iceaway View Post
For ascii-files it won't be an issue, but writing structs to a file is a problem if the same file is written/read on different platforms with different endianness (in which case it is probably compiled using a different compiler anyway).
Ascii files are a royal pain in the backside... you spend more time converting data with scanf() etc. than you do actually processing it... structs are simple, clean and elegant... which is why I recommended it. Decoding and encoding then indexing and maintaining variable length records is just a monumental waste of time...