Passing struct to a function

Question

---

This works:

struct client {
    string address;
    int toPay;
    int id;
};

int main() {
    struct client clients[10];
    ...
    file.read( (char*)&clients, sizeof (clients) );
}

---

What I want to do, is do those things inside of a function.

But how would I have to pass the struct to the function?

If I pass it likes this, read doesn't work:

void newFunction ( struct client *clients_t) {
    ...
    file.read( (char*)&clients_t, sizeof (clients_t) );
}

Answer 1

This is not going to work, because the string data is not embedded into the struct. Instead, it has a couple of pointers to the string content. That is why file.read( (char*)&clients...) is not going to produce a valid result: the string will point to the place where a saved string once pointed, but it would no longer represent the data of interest.

If you would like to serialize the data like that, embed an entire char array in the struct, with the obvious limitation that there would be a cap on the number of characters and some wasted space.