Moving a string from a larger one

Another question

I have two char variables, path and file_name:

Code:

char path[256];
char file_name[256];

During the program, it asks the user to input the values for both of the variables. For example, path might contain "C:\Program Files" and file_name would take it a step further: "C:\Program Files\File.txt".

What I need is to remove the path (in the variable called 'path') from the file_name variable, to get just "File.txt". Can some one please point me in the right direction as how to do this?

Thanks!

If you know that the file_name contents exactly duplicates the path + slash + filename

then
file_name + strlen(path) + 1 will point to the file name.

If you are not sure - You can use strrchj to locate the last slash (or backslash) and start looking for the name from the next char

I can't use strcch becuase file_name could contain another backslash that I need to keep.

What I was thinking was to get the ammount of characters in 'path' (30 for example), and then somehow delete the first 30 characters of the 'file_name' string. Is that a better solution? And what's more... how can I do it? I can get the ammount of characters in 'path' thanks to strspn(), but I haven't a clue as how to erase them from the 'file_name' variable.

Originally Posted by notsocks

I can't use strcch becuase file_name could contain another backslash that I need to keep.

Due to the context of this post, and since you misspelled the function name, I think it's only fair to assume that you don't know the difference between strchr() and strrchr().

Unless you're dealing with directories, the latter should work for your usage. The filename will not have any slashes after it, correct?

Info on both functions:

http://man.he.net/man3/strchr

You assumed correctly: I had no idea. Thanks for pointing that out.

I AM dealing with directories. How will that make a difference?

Well it can get kind of hairy if you're expecting whatever tokens you find to be files. fopen() doesn't cope with directories. Just try it yourself and see.

But, just to illustrate...

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main( void )
{
  char dir[] = "a/sample/directory";
  char file[] = "a/sample/file.txt";
  char *token;

  if ( (token = strrchr( dir, '/' )) != NULL )
  {
    printf( "filepath=%s, *token=%c, token=%s\n", dir, *token, token );
  }
  if ( (token = strrchr( file, '/' )) != NULL )
  {
    printf( "filepath=%s, *token=%c, token=%s\n", file, *token, token );
  }
  return 0;
}

See how it can appear to be correct?