Thread: strtok giving empty strings

Hello everyone,
I am having a bit of trouble getting strtok to tokenize my string. Here is the bit of code that is giving me trouble:

Code:

  printf( "%s\n", temp );
  strcpy(h, strtok( temp, ":" ));
  strcpy(m, strtok( NULL, ":" ));
  strcpy(s, strtok( NULL, ":" ));
  printf( "%s,%s,%s\n",h, m, s );

What comes out is this:

Code:

14:30:20.555
14,,20.555

That is, the first and third of the three substrings work perfectly but the middle one gives me an empty string when what I want is the "30".

Why is it doing that, and how do I fix it?
Thanks,
H.

My output is 14,30,20.555. Are you sure that you've recompiled your code???

Sure, here is the entirety of my code

Code:

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

int main(void){

  char temp[]="14:30:20.555";
  char   h[3];
  char   m[3];
  char   s[6];
    
  printf( "%s\n", temp );
  strcpy(h, strtok( temp, ":" ));
  strcpy(m, strtok( NULL, ":" ));
  strcpy(s, strtok( NULL, ":" ));
  printf( "%s,%s,%s\n",h, m, s );

  return 0;
}

char s[6]; /* 20.555 has 6 chars & no room for null byte declaring to 7 work @ least for me */

Aha! That fixed it. How stupid of me. Why a missing \0 at the end of the third substring should affect the second, I'm not sure.

Thanks everyone.

That makes a lot of sense, and would explain why you couldn't replicate the error: it's essentially random where the character arrays are stored so your m and s might have been in the other order.