The paper presents a novel approach for extracting structural features from segmented cursive handwriting. The proposed approach is based on the contour code and stroke direction. The contour code feature utilises the rate of change of slope along the contour profile in addition to other properties such as the ascender and descender count, start point and end point. The direction feature identifies individual line segments or strokes from the character's outer boundary or thinned representation and highlights each character's pertinent direction information. Each feature is investigated employing a benchmark database and the experimental results using the proposed contour code based structural feature are very promising. A comparative evaluation with the directional feature and existing transition feature is included.