Syntax help.

[gp364481]

Hey everyone,
I am trying to read every line in a text file and write it to a binary file.
Each line has a string without spaces followed by a tab and a non-negative number, such as:

a 74
abc 12
thisisastring 4192

There are some restrictions in writting the binary file but I d rather not go into any details.
My question is how do I make the struct create a char * of length "string" and not of length "line". "line" being each individual line (ie: abc 12)
When I try declaring "string" before the struct definition the compiler complaints.

The structs are to be of different size inside the binary file, that s why I cant just set the string variable to something like char text[255]
Thanks

while(fgets(line, MAX_LEN, finp) != NULL) {                    //read a line from the text file
	struct node {
		unsigned char stringLen;
		char text[strlen(line)]; //how do i make this text[strlen(string)]
		int number;
	};
	typedef struct node MyNode;
	MyNode dummy;
		
	string = (char *)strtok(line,"\t");                       //holds just the string of chars
	numberString = (char *)strtok(NULL, " \n\t");   //holds the number
	dummy.stringLen = strlen(string);                     //length of the string of chars
	num = atoi(numberString);                                //convert to int
	dummy.number = num;                                     
	strcpy(dummy.text, string);
	fwrite((const void *) &dummy, sizeof(MyNode), 1, fop);   //write to binary file

[vart]

to dynamically allocate memory - use malloc

and to not forget that the buffer you need should be strlen(line)+1 to store the nul-terminator as well