Question

Possible Duplicate:
What is the arrow operator (->) synonym for in C++?

I couldn’t find documentation on the “->” which is used a lot in Gnome codebase. For example in gedit they have this:

loader->document = g_value_get_object (value)

What is document in relation to loader? There are many other examples as well with more basic widgets as well.

Answer 1

loader is a pointer. -> dereferences a pointer to a struct. It’s the same as typing (*loader).

Hence:

struct smth {
  int a;
  int b;
};

struct smth blah;
struct smth* pblah;

…to get access to a from blah, you need to type blah.a, from pblah you need to write pblah->a. Remember that it needs to point to something though!