Assign one struct to another in C

Can you assign one instance of a struct to another, like so:

struct Test t1;
struct Test t2;
t2 = t1;

I have seen it work for simple structures, bu does it work for complex structures?
How does the compiler know how to copy data items depending on their type, i.e. differentiating between an int and string?

Yes if the structure is of the same type. Think it as a memory copy.

Yes, assignment is supported for structs. However, there are problems:

struct S {
   char * p;
};

struct S s1, s2;
s1.p = malloc(100);
s2 = s1;

Now the pointers of both structs point to the same block of memory - the compiler does not copy the pointed to data. It is now difficult to know which struct instance owns the data. This is why C++ invented the concept of user-definable assignment operators - you can write specific code to handle this case.

First Look at this example :

The C code for a simple C program is given below

struct Foo {
    char a;
    int b;
    double c;
} foo1, foo2;

void foo_assign(void)
{
    foo1 = foo2;
}

int main(/*char *argv[],int argc*/)
{
    foo_assign();
    return 0;
}

The Equivalent ASM Code for foo_assign() is

00401050 <_foo_assign>:
  401050:   55                      push   %ebp
  401051:   89 e5                   mov    %esp,%ebp
  401053:   a1 20 20 40 00          mov    0x402020,%eax
  401058:   a3 30 20 40 00          mov    %eax,0x402030
  40105d:   a1 24 20 40 00          mov    0x402024,%eax
  401062:   a3 34 20 40 00          mov    %eax,0x402034
  401067:   a1 28 20 40 00          mov    0x402028,%eax
  40106c:   a3 38 20 40 00          mov    %eax,0x402038
  401071:   a1 2c 20 40 00          mov    0x40202c,%eax
  401076:   a3 3c 20 40 00          mov    %eax,0x40203c
  40107b:   5d                      pop    %ebp
  40107c:   c3                      ret    

As you can see that a assignment is simply replaced by a "mov" instruction in assembly, the assignment operator simply means moving data from one memory location to another memory location. The assignment will only do it for immediate members of a structures and will fail to copy when you have Complex datatypes in a structure. Here COMPLEX means that you cant have array of pointers ,pointing to lists.

An array of characters within a structure will itself not work on most compilers, this is because assignment will simply try to copy without even looking at the datatype to be of complex type.

This is a simple copy, just like you would do with memcpy() (indeed, some compilers actually produce a call to memcpy() for that code). There is no "string" in C, only pointers to a bunch a chars. If your source structure contains such a pointer, then the pointer gets copied, not the chars themselves.

Did you mean "Complex" as in complex number with real and imaginary parts? This seems unlikely, so if not you'd have to give an example since "complex" means nothing specific in terms of the C language.

You will get a direct memory copy of the structure; whether that is what you want depends on the structure. For example if the structure contains a pointer, both copies will point to the same data. This may or may not be what you want; that is down to your program design.

To perform a 'smart' copy (or a 'deep' copy), you will need to implement a function to perform the copy. This can be very difficult to achieve if the structure itself contains pointers and structures that also contain pointers, and perhaps pointers to such structures (perhaps that's what you mean by "complex"), and it is hard to maintain. The simple solution is to use C++ and implement copy constructors and assignment operators for each structure or class, then each one becomes responsible for its own copy semantics, you can use assignment syntax, and it is more easily maintained.