Basics of file handling with writing and reading text in C language

Learn: In this article, we are going to learn basics of file handling in C language with example to write and read text in/from a file.
Submitted by Ridhima Agarwal, on October 01, 2017

In C language, file handing is used to manage files in secondary memory, by using file handling function, we can create, read, remove, copy etc files in/from secondary memory. To perform complete file operations, we use file handling.

Type of files (file handling)

There are two types of files, which can be handled through C programming language:

Character Oriented File Handling/Text files
Binary Oriented File Handling/Binary files

For file handling, we use a structure named "FILE" which is declared in stdio.h header file.

Let's have a look of some of the important and most useful file handling functions:

fgetc:
It is used to read single character from the file.
fputc:
It is used to write a single character in the file.
fputw:
It is used to write an integer in the file.
fgetw:
It is used to read an integer from the file.
fscanf:
It is used to read formatted data (like integer, char, float etc) from the file.
fprintf:
It is used to write formatted data (like integer, char, float etc) in the file.
fwrite:
It is used to write mixed data (structure) in the file.
fread:
It is used to read mixed data (structure) from the file.

Writing and reading data in/from file in C language

In this program, we will learn how we can write a file (using character by character) and how can we read all data of a file (character by character) in C language?

For this, we use two functions 1) fgetc – to read single character from the file and 2) fputc – to write single character in file.

Other functions/variables that are used to handle a file:

1) fopen - It is used to open a file in various modes, here I am using “w” mode that means file is open in write mode only. Later, in the program, I used “r” that means file is open in read mode only.

2) fclose - It is used to close an opened file. You must use this function before existing the program.

find program here...