# Input/Output Operations

In Filter, the source input can be either a physical file accessed through a file path, or a filter stream created from a data source. A filter stream in the C API implementation is a C data structure that contains pointers to I/O functions similar to their standard ANSI C counterparts. This structure is passed to filter functions in place of the standard input source. See KVInputStream.

You can create an input stream by using the fpFileToInputStreamCreate() function, or by using code similar to the code in the Filter sample program. The `fpFiletoInputStreamCreate()` function assigns C equivalent I/O functions to `fpOpen()`, `fpRead()`, `fpSeek()`, `fpTell()`, and `fpClose()`. The code in the Filter sample program is shown below. This code assigns the file I/O functions (`myOpen`, `myRead`, and so on) to `KVInputStream`.

    typedef struct
    {
       char  *pszName;
       FILE  *fp;
    }
    MyOpenInfo;

     KVInputStream  IO;
     MyOpenInfo     o;

    /* Initialize the input stream */
    o.pszName = pszFileIn;
    IO.pInputStreamPrivateData = (void *)&o;
    IO.fpOpen  = myOpen;
    IO.fpRead  = myRead;
    IO.fpSeek  = mySeek;
    IO.fpTell  = myTell;
    IO.fpClose = myClose;

The output for extracted content is either a physical file accessed through a file path and specified in the call to fpFilterFile(), or an output buffer specified in the call to fpFilterStream(). The buffer is defined by the KVFilterOutput data structure in `kvtypes.h`.

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