Finding line size of each row in a text file

Question

How can you count the number of characters or numbers in each line? Is there something like a EOF thats more like a End of Line?

Answer 1

You can iterate through each character in the line and keep incrementing a counter until the end-of-line ('\n') is encountered. Make sure to open the file in text mode ("r") and not binary mode ("rb"). Otherwise the stream won't automatically convert different platforms' line ending sequences into '\n' characters.

Here is an example:

int charcount( FILE *const fin )
{
    int c, count;

    count = 0;
    for( ;; )
    {
        c = fgetc( fin );
        if( c == EOF || c == '\n' )
            break;
        ++count;
    }

    return count;
}

Here's an example program to test the above function:

#include <stdio.h>

int main( int argc, char **argv )
{
    FILE *fin;

    fin = fopen( "test.txt", "r" );
    if( fin == NULL )
        return 1;

    printf( "Character count: %d.\n", charcount( fin ) );

    fclose( fin );
    return 0;
}