Thread: Best way to read lines out of a text file

Hi. If i've got a text file like:

--------------
filename1\n
filename2\n
filename3\n
--------------

and want to read a line at a time out of that file into say a buffer

is this the an ok way to do that? or is there a better way?

Code:

char buffer[100];
FILE *fp;
int c;

          do {
                 c = fscanf(fp, "%s", filename);
                 dosomething_withfilename();
          } while (c != EOF);

Oh, and am I right in assuming that fscanf appends NULL to the ends of the lines it
reads into the buffer?
thanks

fscanf() definitely won't do what you want. You want to use fgets(), but that is limited to a specifically sized buffer. That might be okay for your purposes. If you want to be able to handle arbitrarily long lines, it gets more complicated.

But wouldn't the above code read those three lines into filename[] one
at a time in the loop?


I was thinking that each time fscanf was called it would read up to the \n,
and then append a null creating a string in memory.

thanks

Originally Posted by movl0x1

But wouldn't the above code read those three lines into filename[] one
at a time in the loop?

thanks

No, because fscanf() doesn't do that. "%s" means "read a string of non-whitespace characters." It does NOT mean "read an entire line." So if the line of input has a space in it (which it probably does), you will only get the data up to that space.

Originally Posted by movl0x1

But if it was a file that my program created, and was
guaranteed to have lines without space in them it would work.

But the first time a user tries to use it under conditions that violate those assumptions, everything breaks. The word people use for this is "brittle." Sure, you can build your house on a foundation of glass but once the tiniest little crack develops the whole things comes crashing down.

> But if it was a file that my program created, and was
> guaranteed to have lines without space in them it would work.

That's something that will almost never be the case. If this is for your file splitting program I think you are making too many assumptions. If you actually tried to enforce this (just so you can use fscanf()!) then your program's output is useless to human readers. And I think split was developed with a wide scope of applications in mind.

There's lots of ways to read a line that would "work" depending on how detailed your case is. fgets() is a hero in most places. But if you're just spitting out n lines of a file then maybe this is easiest, considering your progress

Code:

int c;
size_t lncount = 1;
for( ; lncount < nlines; )
{
   c = fgetc( in );
   if( c != EOF )
   {
      fputc( c, out );
      if( c == '\n' )  lncount++;
   }
}