Thread: Scanning file contents to variable

I'm trying to scan the contents of a file "phrases.txt" which at the moment is a single character 'g' and I'm trying to put that in the variable c. The problem is that this program below returns a blank character and I'm not sure why. I've even tried changing the name of the file to an invalid file name and it doesn't make a difference. I'm using the latest Dev-cpp to compile and run this if that helps. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Thanks

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <conio.h>

int main()
{
    char c[10];
    FILE * file = fopen("phrases.txt","r");
    fscanf(file,"%c",c);
    printf("%c",c);
    fclose(file);

    getch();                                       
    return 0;                                                
}

1) You need to check the file pointer returned by fopen() to be sure you successfully opened the file.

2) Char c[10] is a character array, not a single character. So you can't use %c to load it or to display it.

3) In your place I'd want to build a test file with perhaps 5 or 6 words in it, single characters and character strings are very different animals.

4) The correct form for main is int main (void)

Ah, thanks for the quick reply. I'll have a play around with it and see if anything changes

I've just found the problem. ;p When I was saving the text file I don't think I should have entered .txt because the file name came out phrases.txt.txt. Cheers tater!

Originally Posted by Porl

I've just found the problem. ;p When I was saving the text file I don't think I should have entered .txt because the file name came out phrases.txt.txt. Cheers tater!

Believe me... you have more problems with the code than just that....

You still need to include error checking code for fopen... and the rest.

Could you help me with that? I'm not quite sure where you mean