Thread: Read Strings From Text File Into Char Array

Good afternoon. I am writing a program that needs to open a text file, read the number of words in said file. and then, using a loop, load those words into elements of an array. The dictionary file won't have anymore than 10,000 words.

My program compiles without issue, but when it runs, it prints the number of entries in my test dictionary to test that the number is being ready properly by my program, and then has a windows error at the next fscanf when I am attempting to read each word into an array element.

Thanks for your time.

Code:

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

int main(void) {

int i, wordCount;
char wordBank[9999];

FILE * ifp = fopen("dictionary.txt", "r"); //open dict file

fscanf (ifp, "%d ", &wordCount); //read number of words in dictionary
printf ("%d\n", wordCount); //verified number is being read

for (i = 0; i < wordCount; i++) //load wordbank array with words

    {

    fscanf (ifp, "%s", wordBank[i]);
    printf ("%s \n", wordBank[i]);

    }

fclose; //close dict file

}

The file format of dictionary.txt is as follows:

Code:

5
apple
bear
cat
devil
poop

Code:

char wordBank[9999];

This declares an array of 9999 characters. If you want an array of [character arrays] strings, you need to use a two-dimensional array. The second dimension should be large enough to hold the largest word (plus the null character).

That's it! I have not programmed in a year and can't believe I forgot about this. Thank you very much.

I always get confused about the zero element of arrays vs making them the right size.

Thanks for the pointers.