Thread: Transferring text from file into linked list

I have to write a program for my current project that will open a file and copy the text into a linked list word by word.

The way I was thinking of doing it was by copying the text into an array and using the spaces between the words to seperate each word and store it in the list.

I was just wondering whether this is the best way of doing it as I am going to have to have a massive array to store all the text (as it is 156,000 characters).

Thanks in advance

What u could do is read a single line at a time. tokensize the string and store them in the linked list. Follow the same till u reach the EOF while reading the file. Use fgets to read a line.

ssharish2005

im not exaclty sure what you mean by buffer, I was planning to read the whole text file into an array. Then when inserting it into the linked list I will split it into seperate words, this is because I need to be able to search the list to check how many times a word appears in the text.

I also need to be able to dynamically allocate the memory for the array, as my program has to be able to cope with the user inputting the name of the file.

I have written the code below to do this, but I am sure this is incorrect as the first piece seg faults at the while statement and the second piece doesn't compile as the putc 2nd statement makes a pointer from an integer without a cast.

Code:

char readdata(char *name){
     char *x;
     x = calloc(1, sizeof(FILE));
     
               
     FILE *ifp;
     int i = 0;
     ifp = fopen(name, "r");
     
     while ((x[i] = getc(ifp)) != EOF){
           i++;
           }
     
     return *x;
}

Code:

char readdata(char *name){
     char *x;
     x = calloc(1, sizeof(FILE));
                    
     FILE *ifp;
     int i = 0;
     char c;
     ifp = fopen(name, "r");
     
     while ((c = getc(ifp)) != EOF){
           putc(c, x[i]);
           i++;
           
           }
     
     return *x;
}

thanks a lot for your help, I did doubt whether the calloc statement was correct. I'll give that a go and see what I come up with.

Thanks again for pointing me in hte right direction

[Code]
ifp = fopen(name, "r");
[\code]

is this line in the program before correct?

I seem to be getting a segmentation fault as a result of this line not working correctly, it is supposed to open the file that's name is stored in the char field name which has been passed into this function.

I have the text file in the same folder as program is running from although this is in my documents and not at the root, does this make any difference.

Thanks again

edit: thanks for the headsup dwks, I was leaving it till the end until I knew the exact program structure so I know when to free the memory but I will comment in a reminder now so I don't forget

Code:

#include<stdio.h>

char *getdata()
{
     char *str = "hello";
     
     return str;
}
int main()
{
    char *p;
    
    p = getdata();
    
    printf("%s",p);
    
    getchar();
    return 0;
}

The sample code gives you the solution for your problem. I terms of returning the char * pointer to the main.

ssharish2005

Thanks, I have it working now. I just have a question about freeing the calloced memory.

Because I need to use this in the main program for furthur operations, how do I go about freeing it. Can I just free the memory by freeing the array that I use in the main program like so:

Code:

int main(){
    char a[30];
    char *y;
    scanf("%s", a);
    y = readdata(a);
    printf("%s", y);
    free(y);
    return 0;
}

edit: the scanf statement is for the input of the file name to be used (just incase this is unclear).