Reading Text File

A.Hill D.Lee W.Ang K.Ree
E.Alexander B.Harvard A.Ericson

I'm trying to get the above lines from the file. I want to read the student names of each line with one variable. I want to return the variable each time with the next student name. Here's what i have so far...but this only gives the first name and it loops infinitely.

while (sscanf (stdntName, "%20s", stdnt))
{
printf("%s\n", stdnt);
}

Well, your loop probably wants to be related to the file & deciding if it has reached the end of it or not. And you could probably use something like fgets in a loop, testing for a return or linefeed character (in order to read each line of the file into a string).

You can use the fgets function to read complete lines from file
and the strtok function to break up the line in separate names.

>>while (sscanf (stdntName, "%20s", stdnt))
scanf doesn't return 0, ever :-) It returns either the number of items converted or EOF, which is negative, if an error happened. Your loop would be better like this

Code:

while (sscanf (stdntName, "%20s", stdnt) == 1)

or better yet

Code:

while (fgets(stdntName, 20, stdnt) != 0)

scanf doesn't return 0, ever :-) It returns either the number of items converted or EOF, which is negative, if an error happened.

It returns 0 if the number of items converted is zero.

The scanf function returns the value of the macro EOF if an input failure occurs before any conversion. Otherwise, the scanf function returns the number of input items assigned, which can be fewer than provided for, or even zero, in the event of an early matching failure.