GW>         The problem I have is this, what is the best
 GW> method of saving the data to disk and/or reading it.
 GW> I'm pretty sure that it isn't a good idea to save the
 GW> pointer info on the disk and then reload it because DOS
 GW> mightn't allocate it the same space. Should I save each
 GW> item of the structure individually or should I create a
 GW> new structure just for storing the info on the disk or
 GW> what?
 GW>         In case it helps, this is the structure I am using:

 GW> struct book{
 GW>         char title[40];
 GW>         char author[25];
 GW>         int year;
 GW>         char type_1;
 GW>         char type_2;
 GW>         struct book *next;
 GW> }

Make this:

struct book {
    char title[40];
    char author[25];
    int year;
    char type_1, type_2;
};

Now, when you manipulate these in memory:

struct s_book {
    struct s_book * next;
    struct book thisbook;
};

In other words, you use a nested structure.

When you manipulate these on disk - assuming you want a flat fixed-record
length file with nothing clever in it like freelists and so forth - then
just read them as "struct book", allocating struct s_book's on
the fly using malloc() or friends.

You can fairly easily make the `container' (here, represented by a linked
list) almost entirely a generic entity for manipulating any sort of linked
list. In some situations - namely, when reporting and so forth - it might
be more convenient to deal with this as an array (or, if you get fancy, a
virtual array where you page the data from disk instead of loading it all
into memory), and the method I suggest would allow you to handle the
database in that manner as well.

--- MaltEd/2 1.0.b6