I/O Files

[Mitzi]

I need my program to read a text file that contains 10 names. Ask the user to enter a name, if the name exists in the file print “The name is found”, if the name is not there print “The name is NOT found”
I have a word document with all the names saved as "lab" in the same file as my program.

So far I have

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


int main ()
{
    char *names;
    char name[20];


    FILE * fin, * fout;


    printf("Enter a name\n");
    scanf("%s", &name);


    fout = fopen("lab.txt", "r");
    if ((fout = fopen("lab.txt", "r")) == NULL)
        printf("error");


    fprintf(fout, "%s", names);


    if (name == names){
        printf("Name is found");
    }else{
        printf("Name is not found");
    }
    fclose(fout);
    return 0;
}

but no matter what name I type it says "Name is not found"

[algorism]

You are doing pretty much everything wrong.

Don't call fopen twice. You can get rid of the first call (or just test fout in the if).

Why is your input file called fout? Wouldn't fin make more sense?

Why are you tryin to print to your input file with fprintf? And names is just an uninitialized pointer so it's an error to use it anyway.

What do you think name == names is doing? Again, names is uninitialized, but even if it pointed to a string, that's not how you compare strings. Have you heard of strcmp?

Anyway, you presumably want to open the file, read each name individually into a char array (so names, or let's call it name_in, should be an array, just like name), and compare it to name until you either find a match or reach the end of the file.