How to skip a line when fscanning a text file?

Question

I want to scan a file and skip a line of text before reading. I tried:

fscanf(pointer,"\n",&(*struct).test[i][j]);

But this syntax simply starts from the first line.

Answer 1

I was able to skip lines with scanf with the following instruction:

fscanf(config_file, "%*[^\n]\n");

The format string matches a line containing any character including spaces. The * in the format string means we are not interested in saving the line, but just in incrementing the file position.

Format string explanation:
% is the character which each scanf format string starts with;
* indicates to not put the found pattern anywhere (typically you save pattern found into parameters after the format string, in this case the parameter is NULL);
[^\n] means any character except newline;
\n means newline;

so the [^\n]\n means a full text line ending with newline.

Reference here.

Answer 2

fgets will get one line, and set the file pointer starting at the next line. Then, you can start reading what you wish after that first line.

char buffer[100];
fgets(buffer, 100, pointer);

It works as long as your first line is less than 100 characters long. Otherwise, you must check and loop.