how to parse a string

Which means, if you'll pardon the C idiom, that you need something like

Code:

while ((*p != *strDelimiter) && *(++strDelimiter));

to get through all the characters of strDelimiter.

It also appears you're missing the "it doesn't count if it starts that way" rule -- strtok skips all appearances of the delimiter character at the beginning of the string. (You skip one character -- regardless of whether it's a delimiter or not -- with the while p++ thing, but the space is still given in the tokenized version as well.) You can argue that that's the way that you want it, but if you add two spaces to the front of your test string you won't be happy with the results.

ETA: Well, we can't use strDelimiter in that while loop up there, since that was our original. But we can do it with a copy.

I suppose. But then again, I don't think that's a good idea.
If that's what you want, then trim the string first.

And look what happens when your test string is

Code:

"This   is   a   test   string"

That actually managed to clobber the original string (on my machine at any rate). Not being able to deal with several spaces in a row seems like a bad thing.

I didn't test that, but I will now.
Nope, works fine for me.

Originally Posted by Elysia

If that's what you want, then trim the string first.

But then we're back at "you may need to make a copy of the original before you do that"...

If you are going to replace a standard function with a "better one", then it should do what the original function does, and be better. Not "my own interpretation of what the original function does". Of course, it's fine if you are only using it for your own purpose and under such conditions where the difference between "my interpretation" and the standard aren't noticeable. But expect criticism if you say "Look, I wrote a better version of function X", and it's not actually doing the same as the original.

--
Mats

Originally Posted by Elysia

I didn't test that, but I will now.
Nope, works fine for me.

Really? I took a guess and put it into Visual Studio, added the extra spaces in the string, and got Run-Time Check Failure #2 - Stack around the variable 'str' corrupted. (Of course, that comes from your while loop not checking index bounds, not from the strtokv3 itself.)

Originally Posted by matsp

But then we're back at "you may need to make a copy of the original before you do that"...

If you are going to replace a standard function with a "better one", then it should do what the original function does, and be better. Not "my own interpretation of what the original function does". Of course, it's fine if you are only using it for your own purpose and under such conditions where the difference between "my interpretation" and the standard aren't noticeable. But expect criticism if you say "Look, I wrote a better version of function X", and it's not actually doing the same as the original.

--
Mats

Alright, I'll just squeeze in

Code:

	while (p < strEnd && *p == ' ') p++;

Between:

Code:

	const char* p = strToSearch;

And

Code:

	while (p++ < strEnd)

And no, sorry tabstop, but I couldn't reproduce it, but the code should check for out of bounds. If you can give a better test case or make a small fix yourself.
Maybe I'll give it another try tomorrow...

So Elysia stated something to the effect that strtok the the devil and asked if there was an alternative. While I can understand this, I'm a bit upset: In fact, alternatives were given lip service on page one. Emphasis mine, since some people can't be asked to read before they open their mouths apparently.

Originally Posted by citizen

[...]

strtok is an okay solution for simple patterns like this I suppose, though there might be issues, especially if you have blank fields (lines with just ":"). If that is the case, you might want to look toward sscanf or strcspn for a parser.

You can view the entire post by clicking the quote arrow. Most of strtok's problems are solved if you simply dupe the string first (except it will still use a static buffer and it will still puke on empty fields). Now I'm sorry I didn't mention it.

Dave Sinkula's tried to spread his alternative to strtok around as well, if anyone's inclined to look.

I reacted on the "how do I know if the delimiter was..." question since strtok would destroy them, as evil as it is. I then asked for alternative solutions, but since noone seemed able to offer any, I proceeded to write a little small utility of my own.

okay I found another problem:

cat : dog mouse mice hot

if I do a while (strtok(NULL, " ")); then I get : after I got cat

but for this one

cat:dog mouse mice hot

I got dog

so this is not consistent..

I don't see how that's possible. The first token for the second string should be cat:dog (since it doesn't break until the space), unless you did the first token differently.

If you used " :" for the first tokenizer, then that's what you should get -- the first token of the first string was "cat", since it stopped at the space; but the second time you didn't worry about the colon, so that became a legitimate token the second time. (If you had used " :" for the tokenizer in the while loop as well, you wouldn't have gotten ":", but "dog".)

> so this is not consistent..

You're positive? The delimiter string matters. " " is not the same as ": " at all. If you have a string delimited by spaces like

cat : dog mouse mice hot

Then the substring ":" is just as much of a token as the other words.

On the other hand, if you used the other delimiter string, then you get "cat " along with the other words. So now you have a problem with trailing whitespace. You can decide if this matters and fix it quite easily.

If you've learned about strings, then you know "cat " is just

Code:

{ 'c', 'a', 't', ' ', 0 }

So, if it matters, make a function that can trim excess whitespace as an exercise, or use one of the alternatives to strtok already discussed.

okay so here's basically what I wan't:

cat : dog mouse mice hot

I want to be able to get cat up to the : but I want to eliminate the extra space that cat has if any,

so cat_ shoud be just cat

if it doesn't find the ":" then it doesn't find cat

So, post your code.

We can sit here and guess 'til we are blue in the face, but you could have done 118 other things...

--
Mats

Just for grins and because I actually enjoy parsing text, here's my rewrite of a better strtok.

Code:

char *better_strtok(char *str, char *delim, char *result, int nresult) {
	char *start = str;
	while (*start && strchr(delim, *start)) start++;
	if (*start == '\0') return NULL;
	char *ptr = start;
	while (1) {
		if (strchr(delim, *ptr)) {
			assert(nresult >= ptr - start + 1);
			strncpy(result, start, ptr - start);
			result[ptr - start] = '\0';
			return ptr;
		}		
		ptr++;
	}
}

int main(void) {	
	char *str = "this : is    :   a:test:123";
	char *ptr = str;
	char buf[16];
	while (ptr = better_strtok(ptr, ": ", buf, sizeof(buf))) {
		printf("> %s\n", buf);
	}
}

> this
> is
> a
> test
> 123