Character Arrays and Strings?

I'm really sorry, because I know this is probably a really easy question, but I pretty much suck at programming, and I'm working on code right now that is supposed to read the information in a text file, then print some of that information. The only problem for me is that it is a more advanced file than I'm used to reading, so I'm not really sure how to begin.

The input file is:

Code:

Last Name	First Name		Class Year	Hometown
Allen 	        James		3	        Tampa, FL
Jones	        Adam		2	        New York, NY
Smith	        Stacey	        3	        Chicago, IL
Beam            Sarah	        3	        Chicago, IL
Oliver          Taylor          4	        Los Angeles, CA

I want the user to be able to choose which line (1-5) prints the data, but like I said, I'm not sure how to begin.

Again, I'm sorry that this is a pretty simple question, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

fopen(), fgets(), sscanf() from stdio.h
You can google around and I'm pretty sure there're tons of examples how to use these functions.

Thanks, I looked for those and they helped a little bit.

I think I'm confused about how to identify the name or value I want to print in my code; all of the examples I've seen, online and in my book, rely on a user input value, then using fgets to analyze the value. I need the user to tell me a line to print the information of, and that's what I'm more unsure about.

Thanks again for any input.

If the user gives you the line number, there is no problem - you just need to perform fgets() several times.

If user needs to know data about fx. Sarah, well that will be more challenging In that case you will have to parse the line after getting it from file, then perform some checking.

Each line represents a record. A record is best represented in code by a struct. A group of records is stored in an array.