Line oriented text file access

[andrew.bolster]

I have been programming in C for a while and can do the usual file access magix, but im wondering if there is an efficient way to access a line of a file, i.e, a wordlist for s sentence generator. I would assume pointer manipulation prior to fscanf would do it but if anyone has any strokes of genius they would be much appreciated.
Thankyou

[MacGyver]

Text files must be read sequentially. You can jump around in them with varying success, but how would you propose knowing where to jump to? Keep reading until you hit the line you're looking for.

If the file is formatted to give you a clue where the desired line is, that's a bonus, but otherwise, there's not much else you can do.

[hk_mp5kpdw]

You mean access a specific line of a file for random read access or just simply reading through a file line by line?

[cpjust]

If you had lines that were always the same length (padded with blanks at the end), you could easily seek to a particular line, but it would waste a lot of space if most lines aren't up to the max line length, and if you want a longer line you'll have to reformat the whole file...

[andrew.bolster]

could the carriage return character be used to delimit the lines and then like you say just step through each line, not actually storing the strings and pick a random line to stop at and read that line?

[Salem]

Unless this is a huge text file with many 10's of MB of data, just reading it all into memory would be a more efficient way of working.

[brewbuck]

could the carriage return character be used to delimit the lines and then like you say just step through each line, not actually storing the strings and pick a random line to stop at and read that line?

Yeah. Just read characters (and throw them away) until you see '\n'. Each time you see that is a new line. Keep going until you are at the line number you want.