Reading from a Files in C programming language

Once the file has been opened for reading using fopen( ), as we have seen, the file’s contents are brought into buffer (partly or wholly) and a pointer is set up that points to the first character in the buffer. This pointer is one of the elements of the structure to which fp is pointing (refer Figure 12.2).
To read the file’s contents from memory there exists a function called fgetc( ). This has been used in our program as,
ch = fgetc ( fp ) ;
fgetc( ) reads the character from the current pointer position, advances the pointer position so that it now points to the next character, and returns the character that is read, which we collected in the variable ch. Note that once the file has been opened, we no longer refer to the file by its name, but through the file pointer fp.
We have used the function fgetc( ) within an indefinite while loop. There has to be a way to break out of this while. When shall we break out... the moment we reach the end of file. But what is end of file? A special character, whose ASCII value is 26, signifies end of file. This character is inserted beyond the last character in the file, when it is created.
While reading from the file, when fgetc( ) encounters this special character, instead of returning the character that it has read, it returns the macro EOF. The EOF macro has been defined in the file “stdio.h”. In place of the function fgetc( ) we could have as well used the macro getc( ) with the same effect.

In our program we go on reading each character from the file till end of file is not met. As each character is read we display it on the screen. Once out of the loop, we close the file.