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C Programming

## sizeof operator

Sizeof is a much used in the C programming language. It is a compile time unary operator which can be used to compute the size of its operand. The result of sizeof is of unsigned integral type which is usually denoted by size_t. sizeof can be applied to any data-type, including primitive types such as integer and floating-point types, pointer types, or compound datatypes such as Structure, union etc.

Usage
sizeof() operator is used in different way according to the operand type.

1. When operand is a Data Type.
When sizeof() is used with the data types such as int, float, char… etc it simply return amount of memory is allocated to that data types.

Let see example:

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("%ld\n",sizeof(char));
printf("%ld\n",sizeof(int));
printf("%ld\n",sizeof(float));
printf("%ld", sizeof(double));
return 0;
}


Output

1
4
4
8

Note : sizeof() may give different output according to machine, we have run our program on 32 bit gcc compiler.

2. When operand is an expression.
When sizeof() is used with the expression, it returns size of the expression. Let see example:

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
int a = 0;
double d = 10.21;
printf("%ld", sizeof(a+d));
return 0;
}


Output

8

As we know from first case size of int and double is 4 and 8 respectively, a is int variable while d is a double variable.
final result will be a double, Hence output of our program is 8 bytes.

Need of Sizeof
1. To find out number of elements in a array.
Sizeof can be used to calculate number of elements of the array automatically. Let see Example :

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
int arr[] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 98, 0, 12, 35, 99, 14};
printf("Number of elements :%ld", sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]));
return 0;
}


Output

Number of elements :11

2. To allocate block of memory dynamically.
sizeof is greatly used in dynamic memory allocation. For example, if we want to allocate memory for which is sufficient to hold 10 integers and we don’t know the sizeof(int) in that particular machine. We can allocate with the help of sizeof.

int *ptr = malloc(10*sizeof(int));