define a function returning struct pointer

Question

Please bear with me, i m from other language and newbie to c and learning it from http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/learn-c-the-hard-way.html

struct Person {         


        

Answer 1

It is defined so because it returns a pointer to a struct, not a struct. You assign the return value to a struct Person *, not to struct Person.

It is possible to return a full struct, like that:

struct Person Person_create(char *name, int age, int height, int weight)
{
    struct Person who;
    who.name = strdup(name);
    who.age = age;
    who.height = height;
    who.weight = weight;
    return who;
}

But it is not used very often.