Thread: reading text from a file

I don't know where to start, someone please point me in the right direction.

I opened a file in main, sent the file pointer to a function, and am now trying to read in text.


the text file goes something like


5
hello there
ok bye now


5 indicating the number of words. Is there a function to read in words, then when encountering a space, go to the next word? I'm guessing that would make my life too easy.

anyhelp is appreciated thankx.

Originally Posted by ktran03

I don't know where to start, someone please point me in the right direction.

I opened a file in main, sent the file pointer to a function, and am now trying to read in text.

Great, where's what you've got so far?

the text file goes something like


5
hello there
ok bye now


5 indicating the number of words. Is there a function to read in words, then when encountering a space, go to the next word?

No.

I'm guessing that would make my life too easy.

anyhelp is appreciated thankx.

Looks like homework. Show an attempt first. You might use fgetc which reads characters or fgets which reads lines (provided the buffer is big enough).

Originally Posted by cwr

Great, where's what you've got so far?


No.



Looks like homework. Show an attempt first. You might use fgetc which reads characters or fgets which reads lines (provided the buffer is big enough).

yo why so bitter?

it is homework. If anyone remembers me from my posts on here, I never ask for code straight. I always ask people to point me in the right direction, so I can learn, and not just get passed code.

Try this (untested)

Code:

char inputbuffer[200]; //make it big enough to not overflow

while(!fscanf(filepointer,"%s",inputbuffer)) printf("%s\n",inputbuffer);
fclose(filepointer);

Originally Posted by esbo

Try this (untested)

Code:

char inputbuffer[200]; //make it big enough to not overflow

while(!fscanf(filepointer,"%s",inputbuffer)) printf("%s\n",inputbuffer);
fclose(filepointer);

thankx,

I'm gonna try to implement that.

but what's the difference between fscanf, and getc?

and when I use getc, how do I know I've encountered a white space, and therefore need to move onto a new word in the array?

Originally Posted by ktran03

thankx,

I'm gonna try to implement that.

but what's the difference between fscanf, and getc?

and when I use getc, how do I know I've encountered a white space, and therefore need to move onto a new word in the array?

fscanf reads it's input seperated by white space (unless specified otherwise) according to to the specified format, %s means a character string.

getc reads a character at a time.

omfg, after 7 hours of pounding my head....I finally got it to read something in.

Code:

    char string[5];
    int i;
    
    for(i=0; i<5; i++){
    string[i] = getc(file);
    printf("%c\n\n", string[i]);
    }

the code is very primitive, but atleast I finally got somewhere.

Originally Posted by ktran03

Code:

    char string[5];
    int i;
    
    for(i=0; i<5; i++){
    string[i] = getc(file);
    printf("%c\n\n", string[i]);
    }

Okay, so you've managed to create a loop, but it's not much use because it insists on reading exactly 5 characters from the file. What you want is a loop that continues until you read the end of the file or an error. Look up what getc() returns when such a condition is reached, and adjust your loop accordingly.

You're not actually clear on what you need the program to do. What do you intend to do with it aside from read the file?

Originally Posted by cwr

Okay, so you've managed to create a loop, but it's not much use because it insists on reading exactly 5 characters from the file. What you want is a loop that continues until you read the end of the file or an error. Look up what getc() returns when such a condition is reached, and adjust your loop accordingly.

You're not actually clear on what you need the program to do. What do you intend to do with it aside from read the file?

I'm gonna take it one step at a time. The assignment is pretty big, I'm trying not to overwhelm myself, chipping away piece by piece.

but task 1 is to get the words read into a string of characters.