strings with sscanf...

[coralreef]

I have a text file that I need to read. The file consists of 3 fields that I need to store. The first is a label of words separated by spaces, the second and third are just one word of text each. I want to use sscanf to process each line.

Please see the attached text file for an example of the format:

My question is this: How can I handle the first field using sscanf? I think I know how to handle th etwo other fields since they are just one word each..but the first field can be one or many words (no more than 20 characters in total length).

Thanks in advance!

[Salem]

Maybe "%20[^\n]"
Which should be 20 characters of anything which isn't a newline.

Though if you know the field widths, building something using strncpy() would be better.

[coralreef]

I was using this to read the two one word text fields

sscanf( p, "%s %s%n", text1, text2, &n);

Now the variable length field has been added to the beginning of each line as I have shown in the example.txt file.

By implementing your suggestion would this work?

sscanf( p, "%20[^\n] %s %s%n", label, text1, text2, &n);

[coralreef]

That worked. Thank you! Plus I read up on it in the unix man pages and now what they say makes a little more sense.