Am I using typedef structures and arrays correctly to read my file? It is not opening

Question

I'm a beginner in data structures with C, I have taken C programming but I've only touched a little bit on structures in the course and I have not kept up with it.

Anyways, I'm trying to make a program that will read data into an array of structures from a file and print out the contents of the array you have populated. I need help figuring this out.. I'm honestly not too sure if I'm doing this correctly either... :/

Any help is greatly appreciated, and thank you in advance: :)

This is what I tried so far

Here's my code:

FYI - The file I'm trying to open is DataFile.txt

#include<stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#define SIZE 10
#define ARRAY_SIZE 30


//Struct contains 3 fields, name, age, salary
typedef struct
{
    char name[SIZE];
    int age;
    int salary;
} data;

data a[ARRAY_SIZE];
FILE * fp = fopen("DataFile.txt", "r");

if (fp == NULL)
{
    printf("Error %s.\n", strerror(errno));
    exit(1);
}


int GetData()
{
    int i = 0;

    fscanf(fp, "%s", a[i].name);
    while(fp && i<ARRAY_SIZE)
    {
    fscanf(fp, "%d", &a[i].age);
    fscanf(fp, "%d", &a[i].salary);
    i++;
}

return i;
}

void ShowData( int records_read)
{
    //Print text file data on screen
    for(int i=0;i<records_read;i++)
    {
    printf("%s %d %d\n", a[i].name, a[i].age, a[i].salary);
    }
}

int main()
{
    char name[256];
    int i = 0;
    int records_read;


    //Call the method, getData
    i = GetData();

    //Prompt and read input from the user
    printf("Pick a number from 1 to 10:");
    scanf("%d", &records_read);

    //Call the method, showData
    ShowData(records_read);

    fclose(fp);

    return 0;
}

The program works if I don't put this part of the code in:

FILE * fp = fopen("DataFile.txt", "r");

if (fp == NULL)
{
    printf("Error %s.\n", strerror(errno));
    exit(1);
}

BUT the output is just a list of zeros..

Answer 1

A quick answer: At first, try to split FILE * fp = fopen("DataFile.txt", "r"); into two parts as one is the variable declaration FILE * fp = NULL; and the other one is the assignment expression fp = fopen("DataFile.txt", "r"); . And then keeps the part of the variable declaration out of all the functions, while moves both the part of the assignment and the if-statement if (fp == NULL){...} into function GetData() . The code might work in this case.