Char. troubles !!!!

Folks...a very frustrating problem........pls. help.

I am reading a input file having special characters like
^L^F^H^I^K^M ...... and so on, among other data.

I am reading the input file using fread.

char *buf ;
Allocate memeory for buf ;
fread(buf,1,LEN,fp);
/* I come to know about the value of LEN just before fread
LEN gives me the number of special characters on current line
in the input file */

Point to be noted each '^L','^F'..... are being stored as 'single'
characters in 'buf'.

After these characters I go on and read other data from the input
file and process it.

In the program I have to convert the special characters to their
decimal values.Their decimal values are given in the ASCII table.

I first tired used 'atoi' which obviously didn't work !!!.

Now I have declared a static multidimensional char. array.
A sample :

static char *table[2][33] = {
{"^@", "^A","^B","^C","^D",..............} ,
{ "1" , "2" ,"3", "4", "5", ................. }
};


My problem is I cannot even use 'strcmp' to compare. 'strcmp'
just fails and dumps core .
Because spl. chars. read from input file as being read/stored as
single characters and my array treats each spl. char as strings.

How do i get the decimal equivalent of such characters in this
case. I am working on SOLARIS platform.


Any ideas ....???
I am really stuck and have no idea how to do it .

Appreciate all kinds of suggestions.


Thanks.

I have two things to say:

1. You are saying that your chars (^M, etc) are stored as single characters. Now in your array you specify those chars as strings, i.e. "^M", as opposed to specifying them as character '^M'.

2. If you want to compare something and strcmp() is failing you, you can always use memcmp(), which essentially does the same thing, but works on anything that you give it.