Assign one struct to another in C

Question

Yes if the structure is of the same type. Think it as a memory copy.

Yes, assignment is supported for structs. However, there are problems:

struct S {
   char * p;
};

struct S s1, s2;
s1.p = malloc(100);
s2 = s1;

Now the pointers of both structs point to the same block of memory - the compiler does not copy the pointed to data. It is now difficult to know which struct instance owns the data. This is why C++ invented the concept of user-definable assignment operators - you can write specific code to handle this case.

First Look at this example :

The C code for a simple C program is given below

struct Foo {
    char a;
    int b;
    double c;
} foo1, foo2;

void foo_assign(void)
{
    foo1 = foo2;
}

int main(/*char *argv[],int argc*/)
{
    foo_assign();
    return 0;
}

The Equivalent ASM Code for foo_assign() is

00401050 <_foo_assign>:
  401050:   55                      push   %ebp
  401051:   89 e5                   mov    %esp,%ebp
  401053:   a1 20 20 40 00          mov    0x402020,%eax
  401058:   a3 30 20 40 00          mov    %eax,0x402030
  40105d:   a1 24 20 40 00          mov    0x402024,%eax
  401062:   a3 34 20 40 00          mov    %eax,0x402034
  401067:   a1 28 20 40 00          mov    0x402028,%eax
  40106c:   a3 38 20 40 00          mov    %eax,0x402038
  401071:   a1 2c 20 40 00          mov    0x40202c,%eax
  401076:   a3 3c 20 40 00          mov    %eax,0x40203c
  40107b:   5d                      pop    %ebp
  40107c:   c3                      ret    

As you can see that a assignment is simply replaced by a "mov" instruction in assembly, the assignment operator simply means moving data from one memory location to another memory location. The assignment will only do it for immediate members of a structures and will fail to copy when you have Complex datatypes in a structure. Here COMPLEX means that you cant have array of pointers ,pointing to lists.

An array of characters within a structure will itself not work on most compilers, this is because assignment will simply try to copy without even looking at the datatype to be of complex type.

This is a simple copy, just like you would do with memcpy() (indeed, some compilers actually produce a call to memcpy() for that code). There is no "string" in C, only pointers to a bunch a chars. If your source structure contains such a pointer, then the pointer gets copied, not the chars themselves.