Thread: String break to words and numbers

I am trying to write a function to read data from an input file (specific format of the input file is as follows - each line is of the form: name score). Then, I want to break the string into a character string part and a number part, then perform manipulation on each. The name may contain any number of words with any amount of white space between them. No word in a name may be a number. The score is a floating point number.

Example sample data (taken from different data sets to illustrate different types of input data):

Cleveland .656
Nagy, Clev 227.0
President Mr. John Adams -71.86
The Wonderful World of Disney +0.101

I use fgets to read in the string (learned the hard way that scanf doesn't work well here). How do I test when a character string stops and the number begins? Would I have to test each character for a number or a special character followed by a number(-1, .5, +0)?

Using strpbrk was exactly what I needed. I'll need to review more of those string.h functions. Thanks!

I think I've finished it. At least it accepts the data sets that I have without errors. Here's the code...

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

main()
{
char myString[100], *myScore;
double numScore;

while (fgets(myString, 100, stdin))
{
printf("\n%s", myString);
myScore = strpbrk(myString, ".-0123456789");

while(myScore[0] == '.' && (myScore[1] < '0' || myScore[1] > '9'))
myScore = strpbrk(myScore+1, ".-0123456789");
if(myScore[0] == '.') numScore = 0.1 * atof(myScore+1);
if(myScore[0] == '-') numScore = -1 * atof(myScore+1);
else numScore = atof(myScore);

printf("The score is: %lf", numScore);
}

printf("\n");
return(0);
}

It skipps over periods if their in a name or title, but accepts them if they are part of a number. Is there a more efficient way to do this, or is this about as good as it gets? Thanks again for your help.