kamal7725

 Profile Answers by kamal7725 Questions by kamal7725

• Nov 30th, 2007

 

Void pointer are something like you put your stuff like shoes, bag, shirt in your suitcase. and then you just take out all that stuff from suitcase.
so we can cast any pointer to void*, and after we can case void* to its original pointer.
if we try to cast it in any other kind of point instead of the original one, the behaviour is undefined.

wael.salman

 Profile Answers by wael.salman 

• Jul 16th, 2008

 

Pointer to void, or a void pointer, is a special type of pointer that has a great facility of pointing to any data type.

Example:

int i;
float f;
int* exf;
float* test;
then
exf=&i;//Corerct-exf is pointer to int and it is pointing to int- &i
exf=&f;//Incorrect - integer pointer pointing to float

but if you define something like this - void pointer

void* sample;

so you can point by sample to any data float or int or anything

sample = &i //Correct
sample = &f //Correct


limitations :

The programmer must note that void pointers cannot be de-referenced in the same manner. Direct dereferencing of void pointer is not permitted. The programmer must change the pointer to void as any other pointer type that points to valid data types such as, int, char, float and then dereference it. This conversion of pointer to some other valid data type is achieved by using the concept of type-casting (refer to type-casting section of this tutorial).



Thank you
Wael