Stride on image using Opencv C++
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I am on windows and use opencv 2.4.2 on C++.
I read an image with `imread` and put it in a Mat object. 
After that, i get a pointer on the raw data using the function `ptr` of the Mat class.
I would like to know how works `imread` when the image contains stride. Is there stride in the data of the Mat or only data of pixels ? 

Additional information: I need the raw data because I am using a code written with array and I don't want to change it for the Mat class.