Function fread not terminating string by \0

Question

New to files in C, trying to read a file via fread

Here's the content of the file:

line1 how

Code used:

char c[6];
fread(c,1,5,f1)

When outputting var 'c', the contents appear with a random character at the end (eg: line1*)

Does fread not terminate the string or am I missing something?

Answer 1

No. The fread function simply reads a number of elements, it has no notion of "strings".

• You can add the NUL terminator yourself
• You can use fgets / fscanf instead

Personally I would go with fgets.