I have encountered a problem with my homework. I need to scan some data from a text file, to a struct.
The text file looks like this.
012345678;danny;cohen;22;M;danny1993;123;1,2,4,8;Nice person
223325222;or;dan;25;M;ordan10;1234;3,5,6,7;Singer and dancer
203484758;shani;israel;25;F;shaninush;12345;4,5,6,7;Happy and cool girl
349950234;nadav;cohen;50;M;nd50;nadav;3,6,7,8;Engineer very smart
345656974;oshrit;hasson;30;F;osh321;111;3,4,5,7;Layer and a painter
Each item of data to its matching variable.
id = 012345678
first_name = danny
etc...
Now I can't use fscanf because there is no spacing, and the fgets scanning all the line.
I found some solution with %[^;]s, but then I will need to write one block of code and, copy and past it 9 times for each item of data.
Is there any other option without changing the text file, that similar to the code I would write with fscanf, if there was spacing between each item of data?
************* UPDATE **************
Hey, First of all, thanks everyone for the help really appreciating.
I didn't understand all your answers, but here something I did use.
Here's my code :
#define _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
typedef struct
{
char *idP, *firstNameP, *lastNameP;
int age;
char gender, *userNameP, *passwordP, hobbies, *descriptionP;
}user;
void main() {
FILE *fileP;
user temp;
char test[99];
temp.idP = (char *)malloc(99);
temp.firstNameP = (char *)malloc(99);
temp.lastNameP = (char *)malloc(99);
temp.age = (int )malloc(4);
temp.gender = (char )malloc(sizeof(char));
temp.userNameP = (char *)malloc(99);
fileP = fopen("input.txt", "r");
fscanf(fileP, "%9[^;];%99[^;];%99[^;];%d;%c", temp.idP,temp.firstNameP,temp.lastNameP,&temp.age, temp.gender);
printf("%s\n%s\n%s\n%d\n%c", temp.idP, temp.firstNameP, temp.lastNameP, temp.age, temp.gender);
fgets(test, 60, fileP); // Just testing where it stop scanning
printf("\n\n%s", test);
fclose(fileP);
getchar();
}
It all works well until I scan the int variable, right after that it doesn't scan anything, and I get an error.
Thanks a lot.
As discussed in the comments, fscanf
is probably the shortest option (although fgets
followed by strtok
, and manual parsing are viable options).
You need to use the %[^;]
specifier for the string fields (meaning: a string of characters other than ;
), with the fields separated by ;
to consume the actual semicolons (which we specifically requested not to be consumed as part of the string field). The last field should be %[^\n]
to consume up to the newline, since the input doesn't have a terminating semicolon.
You should also (always) limit the length of each string field read with a scanf
family function to one less than the available space (the terminating NUL byte is the +1). So, for example, if the first field is at most 9 characters long, you would need char field1[10]
and the format would be %9[^;]
.
It is usually a good idea to put a single space in the beginning of the format string to consume any whitespace (such as the previous newline).
And, of course you should check the return value of fscanf
, e.g., if you have 9 fields as per the example, it should return 9
.
So, the end result would be something like:
if (fscanf(file, " %9[^;];%99[^;];%99[^;];%d;%c;%99[^;];%d;%99[^;];%99[^\n]",
s.field1, s.field2, s.field3, &s.field4, …, s.field9) != 9) {
// error
break;
}
(Alternatively, the field with numbers separated by commas could be read as four separate fields as %d,%d,%d,%d
, in which case the count would go up to 12.)
Here you have simple tokenizer. As I see you have more than one delimiter here (;
& ,
)
str
- string to be tokenized
del
- string containing delimiters (in your case ";,"
or ";"
only)
allowempty
- if true allows empty tokens if there are two or more consecutive delimiters
return value is a NULL terminated table of pointers to the tokens.
char **mystrtok(const char *str, const char *del, int allowempty)
{
char **result = NULL;
const char *end = str;
size_t size = 0;
int extrachar;
while(*end)
{
if((extrachar = !!strchr(del, *end)) || !*(end + 1))
{
/* add temp variable and malloc / realloc checks */
/* free allocated memory on error */
if(!(!allowempty && !(end - str)))
{
extrachar = !extrachar * !*(end + 1);
result = realloc(result, (++size + 1) * sizeof(*result));
result[size] = NULL;
result[size -1] = malloc(end - str + 1 + extrachar);
strncpy(result[size -1], str, end - str + extrachar);
result[size -1][end - str + extrachar] = 0;
}
str = end + 1;
}
end++;
}
return result;
}
To free the the memory allocated by the tokenizer:
void myfree(char **ptr)
{
char **savedptr = ptr;
while(*ptr)
{
free(*ptr++);
}
free(savedptr);
}
Function is simple but your can use any separators and any number of separators.