reading a file line by line and char *

Hi i have a chicken and egg problem. I want to read a file line by line into a char *, let's say str. In order to malloc str I need to know the length of the line which I cannot have unless I read it... The only way I can see is reading character by character till \n character encountered and realloc str in every character. But it seems to me that this quite inefficient and I was thinking of using fgets instead.

Any clues on that?

Cheers.

Use fgets() to read a line into a buffer
Use strlen() to work out the length
Use malloc() to allocate enough space for that line
Use strcpy() to copy from the buffer to the allocated space

But what if the buffer fgets uses is smaller than the line? Won't that cause the remaining characters on the line to stay in the input queue, and thus screw up the next line?

Depends how you want to deal with long lines.
It's easy enough to test if there is a \n in the buffer returned by fgets(). If there isn't a newline, then you make some kind of note to append to the current buffer (following reallocation) rather than allocating a new buffer.

Originally Posted by Salem

Depends how you want to deal with long lines.
It's easy enough to test if there is a \n in the buffer returned by fgets(). If there isn't a newline, then you make some kind of note to append to the current buffer (following reallocation) rather than allocating a new buffer.

so basically you mean:
Use fgets() to read a line into a buffer
Use strlen() to work out the length
Use malloc() to allocate enough space for that line
Use strcpy() to copy from the buffer to the allocated space
If (or better while) buffer does not end with \n fgets() the rest of the line
Use strlen() to work out the length
Use realloc(previous size + size of buffer) to allocate enough space for the line
Use strcat to concatenate the rest of the line

Cheers

If you use a posix compatible compiler, you can also use stat() to get the filesize, allocate the buffer and read it in with fread at once.

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>

static void readfile(FILE *fp, size_t size);

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	struct stat st;

	FILE *fp = fopen(__FILE__, "rb");

	if (fp != NULL && fstat(fileno(fp), &st) == 0)
	{
		readfile(fp, st.st_size);
	}

	if (fp != NULL)
		fclose(fp);

	return 0;
}

void readfile(FILE *fp, size_t size)
{
	char *ptr = malloc(size+1);

	if (ptr != NULL)
	{
		ptr[size] = '\0';
		if (fread(ptr, size, 1, fp) == 1)
		{
			puts(ptr);
		}

		free(ptr);
	}
}

Here's another way to determine the file length (ANSII I think):

Instead of stat(), you can use this code:

Code:

FILE *fp;
long filesize;

/* open fp */
fp = fopen("filename.ext", "rb");

fseek(fp, 0, SEEK_END);
filesize = ftell(fp);
rewind(fp);  /* set the file pointer back to the beginning */

This code sets the file pointer to the end of the file with the call to fseek(). ftell() tells the position of the file pointer (it's a long). And finally, rewind(fp) rewinds the file pointer so you can do other things to it later.

I hope this helps.

dwk

http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/q19.12.html

That's why I opened the file for binary.