Operations on Pointers

Address of Operator (&)

• It is a unary operator.
• Operand must be the name of an already defined variable.
• & operator gives the address number of the variable.
• & is also known as the “Referencing Operator”.

Here’s one example to demonstrate the use of the address of the operator.

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    int a = 100;
    printf("%d\n", a);
    printf("Address of variable a is %d", &a);
    return 0;
}

Output:

100
Address of variable a is 6422220

Indirection Operator (*)

• * is an indirection operator.
• It is also known as the “Dereferencing Operator”.
• It is also a unary operator.
• It takes an address as an argument.
• * returns the content/container whose address is its argument.

Here’s one example to demonstrate the use of the indirection operator.

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    int a = 100;
    printf("Value of variable a stored at address %d is %d.", &a, *(&a));
    return 0;
}

Output:

Value of variable a stored at address 6422220 is 100.