---
title: "Pointers"  
description: "What is Pointer?Pointer is a variable storing memory address of data stored in computer’s memory. Normally, a variable stores numeric, alphanumeric"  
author: "Anonymous User"  
published: 2010-07-27  
updated: 2020-03-04  
canonical: https://www.mindstick.com/articles/11/pointers  
category: "c#"  
tags: ["c#"]  
reading_time: 2 minutes  

---

# Pointers

##### What is Pointer?

Pointer is a variable storing memory address of data stored in computer’s memory. Normally, a variable stores numeric, alphanumeric values of object but pointers stores the memory address of variable’s values stored in memory.

##### Assigning and retrieving variable memory address.

##### Assigning

Before assigning a pointer we need to declare a pointer. To declare a pointer we need to use ‘*’ before a variable name of a pointer (Eg. int *i;). We can declare pointer of any data type as well as self created data types (eg. class). To assign a memory address to a pointer we use ‘&’ sing after the assignment operator (eg. i=&a;). While assigning a memory address to a pointer we need to keep in mind that data type of a variable whose memory address is to be assigned to a pointer should be same as the pointer data type. But void type pointer can handle different types of variables it points to.

##### Retrieving

To retrieve value from a pointer we use ‘*’ sign with pointer variable name (eg. cout<<*i;). To print the address pointer pointing to we simply write the pointer variable (eg. cout<<i;).

##### Pointer and Array

Basically array name is a pointer to its first element.

**Eg.** arr is a array is 10 elements (int arr[10];) then arr is a pointer to its first element i.e. arr[0]. To access the values of array we can also use pointers.

int *i;

i=arr;

for(int j=0;j<10;j++)

{

cout<<*i;

i++;

}

In the code above i++ will increment the memory address by one unit according to the allocation size of the data type, here it will increment by 2. And cout<<*i; will display the value stored in the array.

##### Dynamically Allocating and Deallocating memory

new operator is used to allocate memory dynamically during the runtime. Return value of new operator is pointer; therefore it should only be assigned to a pointer.

Eg.

int *p;

p = new int;

Once the use of the allocated memory is finished we need to deallocate the memory with delete operator

Eg.

delete p;

---

Original Source: https://www.mindstick.com/articles/11/pointers

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