Thread: Question on using fgets

Hey guys,
Can you take a look at my code and tell me what is wrong?
I am trying to use fgets to print the first n characters of each line of a file.

When this function gets called 3 strings are passed to it, the command (which is irrelevant to this example). The maximum length of each line and the file name to be opened for reading.

Code:

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

int trunc(char *command, char *maxLen, char *fileName)
{
	FILE *finp;
	int i = atoi(maxLen);
	char line[i];
	if((finp = fopen(fileName, "r")) == NULL) {
		printf("Error - Cannot open file: &#37;s\n\n", fileName); 
		return 1;	
	}
	while(fgets(line, i, finp) != NULL) {
		printf("%s", line);
	}
	printf(" \n");
	if(fclose(finp) == EOF) {
			printf("Error in closing file\n");
	}
	return 0;
}

For ouput, I get every line of the text file completely and not n characters long as i would like(or i in this example)
Any ideas ?

If fgets() doesn't read the entire line, then it will continue where it left of on the next line. For example, a loop of fgets(buffer, 3, infile) on
ABCDEF\n
will read ABC, but DEF\n will remain in the input file until it has been read from the file in some way. In your case, fgets() will read it in the next iteration of the loop.

There are two solutions that come to mine immediately:
1. Read using fgets much longer line (make sure you have a long buffer), and truncate to n chars before printing.
2. Read using fgets for up to n characters. If the buffer doesn't end up with a newline ('\n') in it, read the remainder of the line up to, inclusive, the '\n' character.

--
Mats

Depends on how you define "better"...

I prefer either of my two solutions. The first one is similar to yours, but instead of calling printf many times, you just put a '\0' in the string where you no longer want to print any more.

--
Mats

Another problem with your new solution is that if a line is read and it is shorter than i, you will run off the end of the string in your for() loop.

And why "p < i-1"?

What happens if maxLen is 20 and the actual line length is 2? Do you think that fix will produce the correct result?