reading a char from file

**suzee_q00** · 03-11-2008

what I am needing to do is read a character from a file into a structure member. I thought it would be simple enough but fscanf, I guess just works for strings. I commented out tons of stuff and put a printf statement after every fscanf and the character line is where it falls apart. The preceding members are strings and after hours of testing everthing else I finally came to the conclusion the fscanf does not return anything that fits neatly into a char.

Code:

typedef struct
{
   char mem1[10];
   char mem2[10];
   char mem3[10];
   char mem4;
   int mem5;
   }struct_a
FILE *fout;

 
 fscanf(fout, "&#37;s", struct_a.mem1);
 fscanf(fout, "%s", struct_a.mem2);
 fscanf(fout, "%s", struct_a.mem3);
 fscanf(fout, "%c", struct_a.mem4); /*this is the line that's a problem*/ 
fscanf(fout, "%d", struct_a.mem5);/*haven't tested to this line yet either*/

I was hoping to be able to continue using fscanf so as not to lose my place in the file.

Hopefully the preceding is enough to give you an idea of what I am doing without weighing the post down with a bunch of extra stuff.

**tabstop** · 03-11-2008

Can the character you want to read in be a space? If not, use

Code:

fscanf(fout, " %c", struct_a.mem4);

which will skip past the newline (from the line before) that you're reading in instead.

Edit: and someone has asked this question recently, so you should be able to find that discussion if you search.

**suzee_q00** · 03-11-2008

Originally Posted by tabstop

Can the character you want to read in be a space? If not, use

Code:

fscanf(fout, " %c", struct_a.mem4);

which will skip past the newline (from the line before) that you're reading in instead.

Edit: and someone has asked this question recently, so you should be able to find that discussion if you search.

Thanks for the reply. It actually worked! I can't believe I wasted hours of my time because of a stupid space. If you could supply more info on the previous post I would be happy to go look that up. I did try a search, being certain that I was not the first person to ever want to retrieve a single character from a file. Perhaps I just don't know what search terms to use.

**tabstop** · 03-11-2008

I used "input character" as the search term -- it was a little hard to find because the thread was actually called "switch statement problem" or something like that.

**vart** · 03-11-2008

also %c and %d formats need pointer to variable - overwise it will crash

Thread: reading a char from file

Thread Tools

Search Thread

Display

reading a char from file

Similar Threads

Another syntax error

Can we have vector of vector?

get keyboard and mouse events

C++ std routines

String sorthing, file opening and saving.