Reading names from a file into strings to reference later

[levitylek]

I have a file of names, for example:
Nick Greg Matthew

I also have an array of:
1 2 3

Is there a way to represent Nick as 1, Greg as 2, and Matthew as 3 so that later down the road when let's say number 2 gets returned from a function, it can be referenced back to the string containing Greg and print out his name?

I hope that's not too confusing/vague, it's only a small part of a larger picture :/

[CommonTater]

That's easy... just load the names from the file into an array... such as friends[100][30] then you can reference them as friends[x] in functions such as printf() and puts()

[Babkockdood]

Use a two-dimensional array. Like this.

char friends[100][3];

This creates 300 bytes. 100 for Nick, 100 for Greg, and 100 for Matthew.

friends[100][0] = "Nick";
friends[100][1] = "Greg";
friends[100][2] = "Matthew";

Use for loops with fscanf statements to obtain the strings from the file.

[CommonTater]

Actually Babcock... you have 100 strings each 2 characters long.

The declaration I used creates 100 strings each 29 characters long and you access it as... friends[0] ... friends[99] using strcpy(), scanf() or fscanf() to put the names in the array.

[Adak]

Parallel arrays: one for strings[rows][columns], and the second one for all the data you want, data[row][columns].

"Bob" can be found in strings[row] with strcmp(), and his index number will match the index number of his data in the data[row].

[Babkockdood]

Actually Babcock... you have 100 strings each 2 characters long.

The declaration I used creates 100 strings each 29 characters long and you access it as... friends[0] ... friends[99] using strcpy(), scanf() or fscanf() to put the names in the array.

Oh, my bad.