Thread: Parsing buffer with strchr

Hi all,
I am trying to parse the following buffer, each are seperated by a '|' char,

Code:

char string[] = "word 1 |word2  | word3| word4|word5";

I got the following, its a bit messy, but I hope someone can point me to the right direction.

Code:

int main(void)
{
	char word[128];
	char *p, prefix;
	int i;
	char string[] = "word 1 |word2  | word3| word4|word5";

	prefix = '|';
	
	p = strchr(string, prefix);

	if(p == NULL) {
		printf("No %c found.\n", prefix);
	}
	else {
		i = p-string;
		//printf("Found %c at position: %d\n", prefix, i+1);
		strncpy(word, &string[0], i);
		word[i] = '\0';
		printf("Word: [%s]\n", word);

		do {
			p=strchr(p+1, prefix);
			strncpy(word, &string[i], (p-string)-i);
			word[p-string] = '\0';

			printf("Word: [%s]\n", word);

			i = p-string;
			//printf("Found %c at position: %d\n", prefix, i+1);
		} while(p != NULL);
	}

	return 0;
}

Output:

Code:

Word: [word 1 ]
Word: [|word2  ╠╠╠╠╠╠╠]
Word: [| word3 ╠╠╠╠╠╠╠]
Word: [| word4 ╠╠╠╠╠╠╠]

Which should be:

Code:

Word: [word 1]
Word: [word2]
Word: [word3]
Word: [word4]
Word: [word5]

Any help and info are much appreciated.

Thanks for the reply, but these colors are surely hard to read .

I have one more question thats bothering me, the loop stops before extracting the last word out, since there are 4 '|'s and 5 words, loop misses the last word. Is there a good way to avoid this, I was thinking of doing the same step once again after the loop.

Because the last word isn't suffixed with a vertical bar, strchr returns failure. The last "word" should be stored in the original buffer, or pointers to it. You simply have to take this into account and strcpy one extra time.