Thread: Printing contents of a text file

I'm simply trying to print out the contents of a text file to make sure I am in fact opening and reading a text file correctly. I also want to store all the characters in an array. Here's my code so far:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {

    FILE * textfile;
    int max_chars = 1000;
    char contents[max_chars];

    textfile = fopen("file.txt", "r");

    fgets(contents,max_chars,textfile);
    fputs("%s",contents);

    return (EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

I tried fgets() to store the characters of the text file in the contents[] array.

Then I tried fputs() to print out the text file.

Am I using the right approach using fgets() and fputs() or should I be doing something else?

fputs() should probably be just puts(contents); you aren't sending it to a file...
fread() is a better tool if you're loading the whole file...

fgets is great for reading a line of text from a file. As Tater pointed out, your usage of fputs is wrong. Check your docs or Google for correct usage. You could simply use puts, but puts adds a new line, so you may end up with the new line you read from the file plus an extra from puts, making the file come out double spaced (assuming you eventually read multiple lines from the file). Your usage of "%s" also makes me think you're mixing it up with printf/fprintf. That's for doing all kinds of special formatting. Again, check your docs or Google for details. Last two things, you need to check textfile for NULL before you try to read from it, in case the fopen failed, and fclose the file when you're done.

No... you want puts() and fread()...
As already pointed out fputs writes to a file, not the screen.

Originally Posted by anduril462

fputs will happily write to the screen if you use stdin as the file descriptor, and it will avoid the potential double newline issue.

Ok... never tried that (I spend most of my actual programming time working in Windows GUI/API mode).

Yeah, stdout...good catch.

I always use printf(). Probably never needed puts in 40 years of programming.

Originally Posted by nonoob

I always use printf(). Probably never needed puts in 40 years of programming.

None the less, it IS there when you're ready...