File Handling question on C programming

Question

I want to read line-by-line from a given input file,, process each line (i.e. its words) and then move on to other line...

So i am using fscanf(fptr,"%s",words) to read the word and it should stop once it encounters end of line...

but this is not possible in fscanf, i guess... so please tell me the way as to what to do...

I should read all the words in the given line (i.e. end of line should be encountered) to terminate and then move on to other line, and repeat the same process..

Answer 1

Use fgets(). Yeah, link is to cplusplus, but it originates from c stdio.h.

You may also use sscanf() to read words from string, or just strtok() to separate them.

---

In response to comment: this behavior of fgets() (leaving \n in the string) allows you to determine if the actual end-of-line was encountered. Note, that fgets() may also read only part of the line from file if supplied buffer is not large enough. In your case - just check for \n in the end and remove it, if you don't need it. Something like this:

// actually you'll get str contents from fgets()
char str[MAX_LEN] = "hello there\n";
size_t len = strlen(str);
if (len && str[len-1] == '\n') {
    str[len-1] = 0;
}

Simple as that.

Answer 2

If you are working on a system with the GNU extensions available there is something called getline (man 3 getline) which allows you to read a file on a line by line basis, while getline will allocate extra memory for you if needed. The manpage contains an example which I modified to split the line using strtok (man 3 strtrok).

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void)
{
    FILE * fp;
    char * line = NULL;
    size_t len = 0;
    ssize_t read;

    fp = fopen("/etc/motd", "r");
    if (fp == NULL)
    {
        printf("File open failed\n");
        return 0;
    }

    while ((read = getline(&line, &len, fp)) != -1) {
        // At this point we have a line held within 'line'
        printf("Line: %s", line);
        const char * delim = " \n";
        char * ptr; 
        ptr = (char * )strtok(line,delim);

        while(ptr != NULL)
        {
            printf("Word: %s\n",ptr);
            ptr = (char *) strtok(NULL,delim);
        }
    }

    if (line)
    {
        free(line);
    }
    return 0;
}