In C, how should I read a text file and print all strings

Question

The simplest way is to read a character, and print it right after reading:

int c;
FILE *file;
file = fopen("test.txt", "r");
if (file) {
    while ((c = getc(file)) != EOF)
        putchar(c);
    fclose(file);
}

c is int above, since EOF is a negative number, and a plain char may be unsigned.

If you want to read the file in chunks, but without dynamic memory allocation, you can do:

#define CHUNK 1024 /* read 1024 bytes at a time */
char buf[CHUNK];
FILE *file;
size_t nread;

file = fopen("test.txt", "r");
if (file) {
    while ((nread = fread(buf, 1, sizeof buf, file)) > 0)
        fwrite(buf, 1, nread, stdout);
    if (ferror(file)) {
        /* deal with error */
    }
    fclose(file);
}

The second method above is essentially how you will read a file with a dynamically allocated array:

char *buf = malloc(chunk);

if (buf == NULL) {
    /* deal with malloc() failure */
}

/* otherwise do this.  Note 'chunk' instead of 'sizeof buf' */
while ((nread = fread(buf, 1, chunk, file)) > 0) {
    /* as above */
}

Your method of fscanf() with %s as format loses information about whitespace in the file, so it is not exactly copying a file to stdout.

There are plenty of good answers here about reading it in chunks, I'm just gonna show you a little trick that reads all the content at once to a buffer and prints it.

I'm not saying it's better. It's not, and as Ricardo sometimes it can be bad, but I find it's a nice solution for the simple cases.

I sprinkled it with comments because there's a lot going on.

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

char* ReadFile(char *filename)
{
   char *buffer = NULL;
   int string_size, read_size;
   FILE *handler = fopen(filename, "r");

   if (handler)
   {
       // Seek the last byte of the file
       fseek(handler, 0, SEEK_END);
       // Offset from the first to the last byte, or in other words, filesize
       string_size = ftell(handler);
       // go back to the start of the file
       rewind(handler);

       // Allocate a string that can hold it all
       buffer = (char*) malloc(sizeof(char) * (string_size + 1) );

       // Read it all in one operation
       read_size = fread(buffer, sizeof(char), string_size, handler);

       // fread doesn't set it so put a \0 in the last position
       // and buffer is now officially a string
       buffer[string_size] = '\0';

       if (string_size != read_size)
       {
           // Something went wrong, throw away the memory and set
           // the buffer to NULL
           free(buffer);
           buffer = NULL;
       }

       // Always remember to close the file.
       fclose(handler);
    }

    return buffer;
}

int main()
{
    char *string = ReadFile("yourfile.txt");
    if (string)
    {
        puts(string);
        free(string);
    }

    return 0;
}

Let me know if it's useful or you could learn something from it :)

Instead just directly print the characters onto the console because the text file maybe very large and you may require a lot of memory.

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

int main() {

    FILE *f;
    char c;
    f=fopen("test.txt","rt");

    while((c=fgetc(f))!=EOF){
        printf("%c",c);
    }

    fclose(f);
    return 0;
}

Use "read()" instead o fscanf:

ssize_t read(int fildes, void *buf, size_t nbyte);

DESCRIPTION

The read() function shall attempt to read nbyte bytes from the file associated with the open file descriptor, fildes, into the buffer pointed to by buf.

Here is an example:

http://cmagical.blogspot.com/2010/01/c-programming-on-unix-implementing-cat.html

Working part from that example:

f=open(argv[1],O_RDONLY);
while ((n=read(f,l,80)) > 0)
    write(1,l,n);

---

An alternate approach is to use getc/putc to read/write 1 char at a time. A lot less efficient. A good example: http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/notes/sx13.html