OPen a file and read it from the last line

Hi All
I am having a problem here. I have a file which saves the data as follows:

Thu 01/24/2008 8:59:27.42 - entry, aa_1, SYS_ADMIN
Thu 01/24/2008 9:01:45.02 - exit, aa_1, SYS_ADMIN
Thu 01/24/2008 9:02:28.69 - entry, aa_1, SYS_ADMIN
Thu 01/24/2008 9:02:45.21 - exit, aa_1, SYS_ADMIN

I want to open this file and read last row(the latest logged line), also i dont want to read the whole line all i am interested in is the word "SYS_ADMIN" in the latest logged row. How can i accomplish this in C Programming?...your help will highly be appreciated. I am pretty novice in C programming so your help will highly be regarded. Thanks in advance!

There's some functions defined in the stdio.h and string.h header who could help you solve your problem. One way to do so is to:

1. Open the file (of course..) (fopen)
2. Position it at the "end of the file - X" (fseek)
3. Read X characters (fgets)
4. Find the last occurrence of a space in the string you just read (strrchr). What you are interested about will be at that position + 1.
5. Eventually, close the file... (fclose)

I have a similar problem in that I wrote a program to process a text file containing variable number of records such as.

Code:

Record 1 start.
...
...
variable number of lines..
......
.......
Record 1 end

Record 2 start.
...
...
variable number of lines..
......
.......
Record 2 end

Record 3 start.
...
...
variable number of lines..
......
.......
Record 3 end

However now I need to read the records in reverse order 3, 2,1 etc....

Probably would be easier just to write a program to reverse the records I think, and keep the existing program as it is.
I guess the original poster could do that - read everything into an array and them write out a new file starting from the end of the array??
It is a bit more complicated in my case as I would have to search back for "Record 3 start", in the example above then write out each line untill i got to 'record 3 end' then search back for 'Record 2 start' and repeat the process.
Would probably be the easiest method for me overall I think.

Problem is that you won't know at what position the last line is, so it's impossible to seek directly.
Thus, there are two ways if you don't want to re-write the file, which I can see.
1. Read the file line-by-line until you find the last line.
2. Seek to end and read backwards until you find a newline. From that point onwards would be the last line (also take into mind that the last character in the file might be a newline or several newlines).

How can i read characters (with fgetc) backwords? I open a file, seek it to the end of the file (with fseek(fp,0,SEEK_END)) and then start reading backwords untill i encounter ','.?

Is there a way to do it?

Thanks in advance

Code:

 fseek(fp, 0L, 2)

takes you to the end of file (as you already should know.)
you can use fgetc in a loop and increment the value of 0L to 1L 2L .... etc. and in every iteration you compare if it is "," . or if you already know the length of "SYS_ADMIN" you just do
fseek (fp, sizeof("SYS_ADMIN"), 2).

once you do that you can do as always with fgetc ...

by the way you should look at The GNU library reference manual. I am sure you will find something better.

> fseek (fp, sizeof("SYS_ADMIN"), 2).
Unfortunately the sizeof "SYS_ADMIN" and the length of "SYS_ADMIN" are different things entirely. The size of the string is equivalent to sizeof (char * ).

If the format is simple enough I don't see a problem with reading the whole file line-by-line and afterward simply searching the last line for the appropriate content. It's certainly no slower than the proposed alternatives. Once you find the word in the area you're interested in you can copy it or do whatever you wanted with it.

It does have the benefit of solving the problem without resorting to "reading backwards," which may mess up future processing.

Originally Posted by nacho4d

Code:

 fseek(fp, 0L, 2)

takes you to the end of file (as you already should know.)
you can use fgetc in a loop and increment the value of 0L to 1L 2L .... etc. and in every iteration you compare if it is "," . or if you already know the length of "SYS_ADMIN" you just do
fseek (fp, sizeof("SYS_ADMIN"), 2).

once you do that you can do as always with fgetc ...

by the way you should look at The GNU library reference manual. I am sure you will find something better.

Thanks for your answer, few comments on it, i increment it by 0L,1L,2L etc, i am already at the end of the file, by incrementing this, i will be going in forward direction not the backward direction, Is it right? Also fgetc will give me an integer back, will i have to compare it's value to the ascii value of ','(comma) or i can simply use comma in the compare string?

Thanks

> The size of the string is equivalent to sizeof (char * ).
Are you sure?

Seek to the end of the file, minus say 100 bytes.
Call fgets() until end of file is reached.
The last result from fgets() will be the last line of the file.

Here's a bit of code of what i had in head

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#define LARGE_ENOUGH_VALUE 12l   // But not to large either...

int main(void)
{
    FILE *file;
    char buffer[LARGE_ENOUGH_VALUE];
    char *ptr;

    if ((file = fopen("test.txt", "rt")) != NULL)
    {
        if (fseek(file, -LARGE_ENOUGH_VALUE, SEEK_END) != 0)
            printf("Error: fseek returned nonzero value\n");
        else
        {
            if (fgets(buffer, LARGE_ENOUGH_VALUE, file) == NULL)
                printf("Error: fgets returned NULL\n");
            else
            {
                if ((ptr = strrchr(buffer, ' ')) == NULL)
                    printf("Error: no space in the line read\n");
                else
                {
                    // Here you could think about removing the '\n' if there is one
                    printf("The last word is: &#37;s\n", ptr + 1);
                }
            }
        }
    }    

    return 0;
}

Anyway. There's more systematic solution like the one Salem proposed (ie, checking if the line you just read is really the last line of the file, which is something my code isn't doing) but if your log file have a really "standard structure", the solution i gave could also work. But it still would be good to check if the line you read with fgets is really the last line of the file... and since this is not difficult to implement, well, you know what you have to do now.

Originally Posted by citizen

> fseek (fp, sizeof("SYS_ADMIN"), 2).
Unfortunately the sizeof "SYS_ADMIN" and the length of "SYS_ADMIN" are different things entirely. The size of the string is equivalent to sizeof (char * ).

Visual Studio returns the length, in bytes, of the actual string and not the size of the char* pointer itself.

Code:

size_t n = sizeof("This is a test string");

Returns 22.

Code:

size_t n = sizeof(L"This is a test string");

Returns 44.

Originally Posted by c_geek

Thanks for your answer, few comments on it, i increment it by 0L,1L,2L etc, i am already at the end of the file, by incrementing this, i will be going in forward direction not the backward direction, Is it right? Also fgetc will give me an integer back, will i have to compare it's value to the ascii value of ','(comma) or i can simply use comma in the compare string?

Thanks

in fseek () the second argument is the offset. Wich means the distance between the current position and (in case the 3rd argument is 2)the end of file. or the distance between the current and the start of file (in case the 3rd argument is 1)
the second argument must be a long that is why I put and "L" (ie : 0L, 1L, 2L)

in other words. for going backwards from the end of file you should set the 3rd argument 2.
and increment the 2nd argument everytime you want to compare the character.

Regarding the integer comparation. well sorry i mistaked, haha. i dont remember very goog but i am sure there is a function to get the character (as a char type). maybe something like fgets() ??

why dont use this?

Code:

[Function] 
char * strrchr (const char *string, int c ) 
The function strrchr is like strchr, except that it searches backwards from the end 
of the string string (instead of forwards from the front). 
For example, 
strrchr ("hello, world", ’l’) 
⇒ "ld"

in your file you have a lot of lines but I think you can arrange that right? maybe coping a entire line to a string, then you apply the function above
As I sayd before is a very good idea to take a look to the GNU C manual reference. If you want to master functions and system calls is a good start good luck.

Originally Posted by nacho4d

Code:

 fseek(fp, 0L, 2)

But now seriously, we are supposed to use SEEK_SET, SEEK_END for a reason, instead of pure numbers. It makes the code more readable, so use them!

/me points out that random seeks on a text file are undefined to begin with.