How to split a text into two dimensional array in c - arrays

Question

I'm trying to split this string:
this is a text file
looking for the word cat
the program should print also cats
and crat and lcat but it shouldn’t
print the word caats
into a two dimensional arrays such that every line in the text is a line in the array.
For example:
lines[0][0] = 't'
lines[0][1] = 'h'
and so on. For now, this is my code:
void print_lines(char txt[]){
char lines[SIZE][SIZE];
int num_of_lines = fill_lines(txt, lines);
printf("lines: %d\n",num_of_lines );
int i;
for (i = 0; i < num_of_lines; i++)
{
printf("%s\n", lines[i]);
}
}
int fill_lines(char txt[], char lines[][]){
char copy[strlen(txt)];
memcpy(copy, txt, strlen(txt));
char *line = strtok(copy, "\n");
int i = 0;
while(line != NULL){
strcpy(lines[i][0], line);
line = strtok(NULL, "\n");
i++
}
return i + 1;
}
The problem I'm currently dealing with is an error in strcpy(lines[i], line) that reads:
expression must be a pointer to a complete object type
I have also tried memcpy(lines[i], line, strlen(line)).
Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I think this should work for you
Here I used '\n' as a delimiter
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <assert.h>
char **str_split(char *a_str, const char a_delim)
{
char **result = 0;
size_t count = 0;
char *tmp = a_str;
char *last_comma = 0;
char delim[2];
delim[0] = a_delim;
delim[1] = 0;
/* Count how many elements will be extracted. */
while (*tmp)
{
if (a_delim == *tmp)
{
count++;
last_comma = tmp;
}
tmp++;
}
/* Add space for trailing token. */
count += last_comma < (a_str + strlen(a_str) - 1);
/* Add space for terminating null string so caller
knows where the list of returned strings ends. */
count++;
result = malloc(sizeof(char *) * count);
if (result)
{
size_t idx = 0;
char *token = strtok(a_str, delim);
while (token)
{
assert(idx < count);
*(result + idx++) = strdup(token);
token = strtok(0, delim);
}
assert(idx == count - 1);
*(result + idx) = 0;
}
return result;
}
int main()
{
char text[] = "this is a text file\nlooking for the word cat\nthe program should print also cats\nand crat and lcat but it shouldn’t\nprint the word caats";
char **tokens;
printf("ORIGINAL TEXT:\n%s\n\n", text);
tokens = str_split(text, ',');
if (tokens)
{
int i;
for (i = 0; *(tokens + i); i++)
{
printf("%s\n", *(tokens + i));
free(*(tokens + i));
}
printf("\n");
free(tokens);
}
return 0;
}