Moving position in file to keywords

[Lateralus]

First I'll say hello since this is my first post.

Ok, now I am experimenting with random file access and am curious as to how I should go about setting the current read/write position of the file to the space next to a keyword. For instance, if my file includes the line:

EMPC 23

I want to read in the integer 23. There has got to be a better way to do this than using fseek() manually.

Also, when using fscanf(), and after some input is scanned, where does the file position go to? the next line?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[hk_mp5kpdw]

You can simply use fscanf to read the string of characters in and also the integer value.

char buffer[80];  /* Or some other sufficient size */
int value;
FILE* fp;

fp = fopen("whatever.txt","r");

fscanf(fp,"%s %d", buffer, &value);

No fseek required.

[Lateralus]

Thanks for the reply, but maybe I wasn't clear.

I want to know if there is a function to search down a file, and place the current read/write position after that keyword, or at the begininng of it at least.

I could write a function to search down until a matching keyword is found, but I was hoping there was one already availible.

[jim mcnamara]

There is no function like that in standard C.

You can bypass fseek completely: call stat() to get a file size, then fread() to read the entire file into a buffer, then call one of the string search functions like strstr() to return the position of the search string in the buffer.

This will be fine for smaller files, up to several MB or more -- depending on your hardware - memory mostly.

[quzah]

Is this a text file? If so, the "integer 32" is not an integer at all. It's simply two bytes containing the characters '2' and '3'. Thus, you cannot simply change that to say, 1000, because that would be four bytes. There is no function in standard C that will allow you insert more, or remove some bytes in the middle of a file.


Quzah.

[Lateralus]

That explains enough.

All I want to do is read in the characters, from there I need to use the numbers, that is all. The file will be replaced by a newly generated one.

Thanks for the help tho.

[dwks]

FILE *fp = fopen("file.ext","r");
char c;
int i = 0;

while(1) {
    c = fgetc(fp);
    if(feof(fp) || c=='\n') break;

    if(isdigit(c)) {
        i *= 10;
        i += (c-'0');
    }
}

printf("\nNumber from file: %i\n", i);

Or of course you could just use fscanf().

dwk