fread() function in c – fread C Library Function

September 24, 2022 by veer

Fread in c: The function size_t fread(void *ptr, size_t size, size_t count, FILE *stream); reads count number of objects each of size bytes from the given stream and stores them in the block of memory(array) specified by ptr. It copy total size x count bytes from given stream to memory block.

Function prototype of fread

size_t fread(void *ptr, size_t size, size_t count, FILE *stream);

ptr : This is the pointer to a block of memory having atleast size*count bytes, type-casted to a void pointer.
size : This is the size of each element to be read in bytes.
count : This is the number of elements to be read from stream, each one with a size of size bytes.
stream : A pointer to a FILE object which identifies a stream from where we want to read.

Return value of fread

fread() function in c: This function returns the total number of elements successfully read from stream as a size_t(size_t is an unsigned integral type). If either a reading error occurred or the end-of-file was reached then proper indicator is set, which can be checked with ferror and feof, respectively.

C program using fread function

Fread c example: The following program shows the use of fread function to read a string from stream and stores in a character array.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
 
int main(){
   FILE *file;
   char buff[20]; 
   char *string = "fread C Standard library function";
    
   /* Open file for reading and writing */
   file = fopen("textFile.txt", "w+");
 
   /* Write data to the file */
   fputs(string, file);
 
   /* Reset file pointer to the beginning of file */
   fseek(file, 0, SEEK_SET);
 
   /* Read string from file to a character array */
   fread(buff, strlen(string)+1, 1, file);\
    
   printf("%s\n", buff);
   fclose(file);
    
   return(0);
}

Output

fread C Standard library function

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