Thread: How do I read in this as a string?

Two solutions (I recommend the one at the bottom) http://faq.cprogramming.com/cgi-bin/...&id=1043284351 gets() and fgets()

Not gets(), of course, but fgets(). However, that assumes that you know the length of the name, but here it is unknown.

One way would be to scan character by character. If you encounter a character that is valid for a name, you copy it to the name string. If you encounter whitespace, you do not copy it over until you encounter a non-whitespace character, in which case you either decide to add the space and then the non-whitespace character, or if the non-whitespace character is a digit, you begin reading in the age (?).

This is painfully manual though, so perhaps someone would be able to suggest a better method.

You can use isdigit() from <ctype.h>

If you can modify the input file, use a delimiter other than a space and break each line in half with strtok:

Jamie lynn:20
Eric D. Mcdaniel:40
Joe:23

Code:

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


int main () {
        short int i=0;
        size_t len;
        char *line=NULL, *tok, DL[]=":\n";
        FILE *fstRO=fopen("/root/test/test.txt", "r");
        struct {char *name;
                int age;
        } *examp;   

        examp = malloc(sizeof(*examp));           
        while((getline(&line,&len,fstRO)) != -1) {
                tok=strtok(line,DL);
                if (i>0) examp = realloc(examp, (i+1) * sizeof(*examp));
                examp[i].name=malloc(strlen(tok)+1);
                strcpy(examp[i].name,tok);
                tok=strtok(NULL,DL);
                examp[i].age=atoi(tok); 
                i++;
        }   
        free(line);
        fclose(fstRO);

        for (i=0;i<3;i++) printf("%s is %d\n", examp[i].name,examp[i].age);
}

If you can't change anything about the input file, you'll have to do the character by charater method (and hope that no one has a wierd name like "Bob 35"). Beware: I don't know what the non-GNU equivalent of getline is.