adding specific chars from file to an array

[CsdJohn]

lets say we have a txt that contains this


| | | | |*| |
| | | |*| | |

and that symbolizes a 2x6 char array and we want to take only the symbols inside the || and place them in a 2x6 char array.
how do we do that?

[c99tutorial]

You could process each line by reading it into a buffer e.g. with fscanf. Then use sscanf to pull out each element from your string, e.g.

char example[] = "| | | | |*| |";    
char buf[6][2] = {"", "", "", "", "", ""};
sscanf(example, "|%1[ *]|%1[ *]|%1[ *]|%1[ *]|%1[ *]|%1[ *]|", 
    buf[0], 
    buf[1], 
    buf[2], 
    buf[3], 
    buf[4], 
    buf[5]);
for (int i = 0; i < 6; i++) {
    printf("%d: %s\n", i, buf[i]);
}

This assumes that you have at exactly one character in between each | symbol, however. To avoid this requirement, you could process the line using strtok or scan it character by character for the needed information.