2. UNIONS
• A union is a special data type available in C that allows to store
different data types in the same memory location.
• You can define a union with many members, but only one member can
contain a value at any given time.
• Unions provide an efficient way of using the same memory location
for multiple-purpose.
3. DEFINING A UNION
• To define a union, you must use the union statement in the same way as you
did while defining a structure.
• The union statement defines a new data type with more than one member for
your program. The format of the union statement is as follows −
union [union tag] {
member definition;
member definition;
...
member definition;
} [one or more union variables];
4. CREATING A UNION VARIABLE
• When a union is defined, it creates a user-defined type. However, no
memory is allocated.
• To allocate memory for a given union type and work with it, we need
to create variables.
• The memory occupied by a union will be large enough to hold the
largest member of the union
5. ACCESSING UNION MEMBERS
• To access any member of a union, we use the member access operator
(.).
• The member access operator is coded as a period between the union
variable name and the union member that we wish to access.
6. SIZE OF UNION
• The size of the union is based on the size of
the largest member of the union.
• As we know, the size of int is 4 bytes, size
of char is 1 byte, size of float is 4 bytes, and
the size of double is 8 bytes.
• Since the double variable occupies the
largest memory among all the four
variables, so total 8 bytes will be allocated
in the memory.
• Therefore, the output of the program would
be 8 bytes.
7. ACCESSING MEMBERS USING POINTERS
• We can access the members of the
union through pointers by using
the (->) arrow operator.
• In the above code, we have
created a pointer variable, i.e.,
*ptr, that stores the address of var
variable.
• Now, ptr can access the variable
'a' by using the (->) operator.
• Hence the output of the above
code would be 90.
