Let's say I have a line like this:
1 yellow car 550.00
How can I parse this line into int quantity, char description[40] and float price and detect if the user does not use that format? I tried this:
but it doesn't work. Thanks.Code:if(sscanf(line, "%d[^' ',%39[^' '],%f", quantity, description, price) != 3){ printf("Error\n"); return 0; }
The first thing that comes to my mind is strtok(). You specify a delimiting character, in your case, ' ' (space), and then call strtok() several times, assigning the result to different pointers. It will replace the next space with a null character, and return a pointer to the beginning of that token, so you'd end up with pointers to the following strings:
Then you'd just convert the first and last strings into numerical values using atoi().Code:1\0 yellow\0 car\0 550.00\0
I may be missing a really obvious solution, but this should work.
Well you seem to have completely mis-understood what character classes are in sscanf.
Try this
Basically, it relies on descriptions never having digits, so "2 Mazda MX2 2345.00" would break this code.Code:#include <stdio.h> int main ( ) { char test[] = "1 yellow car 550.00"; int ncars; char description[100]; float price; int scanresult; scanresult = sscanf( test, "%d %[^0-9] %f", &ncars, description, &price ); if ( scanresult == 3 ) { printf( "N=%d, Desc=%s, Price=%f\n", ncars, description, price ); } else { printf( "Bad format\n" ); } return 0; }
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
Salem, thanks.
Could you point me to a good place where I can read about character classes in sscanf()?
Also, what if I want to use sscanf() just to parse the line and then validate each variable individually? Can I ignore the return value from sscanf()? How would I allow numbers to be read into the variable description? Thanks.
> Could you point me to a good place where I can read about character classes in sscanf()?
Any decent C book
If you're going to parse each value manually, I see no point in having an initial pass with sscanf.
> How would I allow numbers to be read into the variable description?
It's going to be tough using scan sets, that's for sure. Unlike PERL say, where you can have qualified look-ahead to determine whether you should be including stuff or not.
Files with unique delimiters are much easier to parse.
I suppose in this case, the first int is the quantity, the last float is the price, and everything else is the description.
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
I changed the way the user inputs variable line. Now it's going to be like this:
1,yellow car,550.00
I was able to parse the line myself but I have one last problem (I hope). How do I stop special characters (ie: &^%$#@!&*) from being read into variable description. I think it has something to do with their ASCII value but I am not sure. Thanks.
Well once you've read the description, loop over it calling isalpha() or isprint()
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
