2.7 Files

Basics and classification of files

When reading input from the keyboard and writing output to the monitor you have been using a special case of file I/O (input/output). You already know how to read and write text data, as you have been doing it every time you use scanf() and printf() . All you need to do now is learn how to direct I/O to file other than from your keyboard or to your monitor.

Abstractly, a file is a collection of bytes stored on a secondary storage device, which is generally a disk of some kind. The collection of bytes may be interpreted, for example, as characters, words, lines, paragraphs and pages from a textual document; fields and records belonging to a database; or pixels from a graphical image. The meaning attached to a particular file is determined entirely by the data structures and operations used by a program to process the file. It is conceivable (and it sometimes happens) that a graphics file will be read and displayed by a program designed to process textual data. The result is that no meaningful output occurs (probably) and this is to be expected. A file is simply a machine decipherable storage media where programs and data are stored for machine usage.

Essentially there are two kinds of files that programmers deal with text files and binary files:

• Text files are any files that contain only ASCII characters. Examples include C source code files, HTML files, and any file that can be viewed using a simple text editor.
• Binary files are any files that created by writing on it from a C-program, not by an editor (as with text files). Binary files are very similar to arrays of records, except the records are in a disk file rather than in an array in memory. Because the records in a binary file are on disk, you can create very large collections of them (limited only by your available disk space). They are also permanent and always available. The only disadvantage is the slowness that comes from disk access time.

A text file can be a stream of characters that a computer can process sequentially. It is not only processed sequentially but only in forward direction. For this reason a text file is usually opened for only one kind of operation (reading, writing, or appending) at any given time.

Similarly, since text files only process characters, they can only read or write data one character at a time. (In C Programming Language, Functions are provided that deal with lines of text, but these still essentially process data one character at a time). A text stream in C is a special kind of file. Depending on the requirements of the operating system, newline characters may be converted to or from carriage-return/linefeed combinations depending on whether data is being written to, or read from, the file. Other character conversions may also occur to satisfy the storage requirements of the operating system. These translations occur transparently and they occur because the programmer has signaled the intention to process a text file.

A binary file is no different to a text file. It is a collection of bytes. In C Programming Language a byte and a character are equivalent. Hence a binary file is also referred to as a character stream, but there are two essential differences.