How to write a floating point array to a file in C? - arrays

I have an float array, that has 189 elements (running from index 0 to index 188). I'm having trouble writing this array out to a file. Suppose the first element is 45.6, and the second element is 67.9, I want my output file to look like this:
0, 45.6
1, 67.9
and so on. I've tried the function shown below, and the result is my output file has odd characters in it.
void writeCorrelationToFile(float slidingCorrelator[])
{
FILE *fp;
fp=fopen("CorrelationResult.txt","w");
printf("inside writeCorrelationToFile, writing out array using fwrite \n");
fwrite(slidingCorrelator,4,sizeof(slidingCorrelator),fp);
fclose(fp);
}
I get an output file like this:
�'���۽l^��(���!>
I have also tried setting sizeof(slidingCorrelator) to 189, but that also did not help.

The fwrite() function writes binary data. What you want to write is the human readable (i.e. text) representation of your float values, not the binary representation.
You can do this using fprintf():
float slidingCorrelator[N];
FILE *fp;
// ... fill the array somehow ...
fp = fopen("CorrelationResult.txt", "w");
// check for error here
for (unsigned i = 0; i < N; i++) {
fprintf(fp, "%d, %f\n", i, slidingCorrelator[i]);
// check for error here too
}
fclose(fp);
Don't forget to check the return value of those functions to detect errors. For more information, see:
man 3 fwrite
man 3 fprintf
man 3 fopen

Related

My program creates a file named date.in but it is not inserting all the numbers

Write a C program that reads from the keyboard a natural number n
with up to 9 digits and creates the text file data.out containing the
number n and all its non-zero prefixes, in a single line, separated by
a space, in order decreasing in value. Example: for n = 10305 the data
file.out will contain the numbers: 10305 1030 103 10 1.
This is what I made:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
int n;
FILE *fisier;
fisier=fopen("date.in","w");
printf("n= \n");
scanf("%d",&n);
fprintf(fisier,"%d",n);
while(n!=0)
{
fisier=fopen("date.in","r");
n=n/10;
fprintf(fisier,"%d",n);
}
fclose(fisier);
}
Few things:
Function calls may return error. You need to check that every time.
fisier=fopen("date.in","w");
This should have been followed by an error check. To understand more on what it return, first thing you should do is read the man page for that function. See man page for fopen(). If there is an error in opening the file, it will return NULL and errno is set to a value which indicates what error occurred.
if (NULL == fisier)
{
// Error handling code
;
}
Your next requirement is separating the numbers by a space. There isn't one. The following should do it.
fprintf(fisier, "%d ", n);
The next major problem is opening the file in a loop. Its like you are trying to open a door which is already open.
fisier=fopen("date.in","r");
if(NULL == fisier)
{
// Error handling code
;
}
while(n!=0)
{
n=n/10;
fprintf(fisier,"%d",n);
}
fclose(fisier);
A minor issue that you aren't checking is the number is not having more than 9 digits.
if(n > 999999999)
is apt after you get a number. If you want to deal with negative numbers as well, you can modify this condition the way you want.
In a nutshell, at least to start with, the program should be something similar to this:
#include <stdio.h>
// Need a buffer to read the file into it. 64 isn't a magic number.
// To print a 9 digit number followed by a white space and then a 8 digit number..
// and so on, you need little less than 64 bytes.
// I prefer keeping the memory aligned to multiples of 8.
char buffer[64];
int main(void)
{
size_t readBytes = 0;
int n = 0;
printf("\nEnter a number: ");
scanf("%d", &n);
// Open the file
FILE *pFile = fopen("date.in", "w+");
if(NULL == pFile)
{
// Prefer perror() instead of printf() for priting errors
perror("\nError: ");
return 0;
}
while(n != 0)
{
// Append to the file
fprintf(pFile, "%d ", n);
n = n / 10;
}
// Done, close the file
fclose(pFile);
printf("\nPrinting the file: ");
// Open the file
pFile = fopen("date.in", "r");
if(NULL == pFile)
{
// Prefer perror() instead of printf() for priting errors
perror("\nError: ");
return 0;
}
// Read the file
while((readBytes = fread(buffer, 1, sizeof buffer, pFile)) > 0)
{
// Preferably better way to print the contents of the file on stdout!
fwrite(buffer, 1, readBytes, stdout);
}
printf("\nExiting..\n\n");
return 0;
}
Remember: The person reading your code may not be aware of all the requirements, so comments are necessary. Secondly, I understand english to a decent level but I don't know what 'fisier' means. Its recommended to name variables in such a way that its easy to understand the purpose of the variable. For example, pFile is a pointer to a file. p in the variable immediately gives an idea that its a pointer.
Hope this helps!
To draw a conclusion from all the comments:
fopen returns a file handle when successfull and NULL otherwise. Opening a file twice might result in an error (it does on my machine), such that fisier is set to NULL inside the loop. Obvioulsy fprintf to NULL wont do anything.
You only need to call fopen once, so remove it from the loop. After that it will work as intended.
It's alwas good to check if the fopen succeeded or not:
FILE *fisier;
fisier=fopen("date.in","w");
if(!fisier) { /* handle error */ }
You print no spaces between the numbers. Maybe that's intended, but maybe
fprintf(fisier,"%d ",n);
would be better.

How to read values from a text file and store them in different variable types in C

I need to read a text file with 7 lines into 7 different variables. The text file looks like this:
.2661
A.txt
B.txt
C.txt
1
2
0.5 0.6
These are the variables that I need to store each line into:
float value1; // line 1 from .txt file
char *AFileName; // line 2 from .txt file
char *BFileName; // line 3 from .txt file
char *CFileName; // line 4 from .txt file
int value2; // line 5 from .txt file
int lastLineLength; // line 6 from .txt file
double lastLine[lastLineLength]; // line 7 from .txt file - this can be different lengths
I have currently been doing this by just using the arguments when I call my program from the command line and the argv command.
First open the file using fopen with read access:
FILE *inputFile = fopen(filename, "r");
if(!inputFile) {
// Error opening file, handle it appropriately.
}
Then read the data from the file using fscanf. The first parameter is the FILE * we created above. The second parameter is a format string that specifies what fscanf should expect while reading the file. The remaining parameters are pointers to variables that will hold the data read from the file.
int variablesFound;
variablesFound = fscanf(inputFile, "%f\n%s\n%s\n%s\n%d\n%d\n", &value1, AFileName, BFileName, CFileName, &value2, &lastLineLength);
if(variablesFound < 6) {
// There was an error matching the file contents with the expected pattern, handle appropriately.
}
double lastLine[lastLineLength];
// Iterate over the last line.
int lastLineIndex;
for(lastLineIndex = 0; lastLineIndex < lastLineLength; lastLineIndex++) {
fscanf(inputFile, "%lf", &lastLine[lastLineIndex]);
fscanf(inputFile, " "); // Eat the space after the double.
}
Edit
After comments I realized it might be worth noting that you have to allocate memory to your variables as the real first step. The primitives (those with an & below) can be declared as normal. For the string (char array), you'll want to do one of the following:
char *aFileName = calloc(MAX_FILENAME_SIZE + 1, sizeof(char));
or
char aFileName[MAX_FILENAME_SIZE + 1];
Depending on what your purpose with aFileName would be determines which method would be appropriate. However, assuming this code appears in the main or doesn't need to exist beyond the scope of the function, the latter would be better as it doesn't require free()ing the variable after you're done with it.
It also may be worth while singling out the code that deals with reading input if your requirements change often.
You can read from the file as follows:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(void)
{
FILE * fp;
char * line = NULL;
size_t len = 80;
fp = fopen("<path to your file>", "r");
if (fp == NULL)
exit(-1);
while (getline(&line, &len, fp) != -1)
printf("%s", line);
fclose(fp);
return 0;
}
getline reads character strings from the file, so you'd have to parse the lines as needed (atoi, atof).

Format file to have 5 numbers per line

I am working on a text file containing integers separated by spaces, for instance:
1 2 57 99 8 14 22 36 98 445 1001 221 332 225 789 1111115 147 0 1 21321564 544 489 654 61266 5456 15 19
I would like to re-format this file to only contain 5 integers in any line but the last, and at most 5 integers in the last line.
My code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main()
{
FILE *f; // main file (A.txt)
FILE *g; // file copy (B.txt)
// open A.txt to read data
f = fopen("file/path/here/A.txt", "r");
if (f == NULL) {
printf("Read error.\n");
fclose(f);
return -1;
}
// open B.txt to write data
g = fopen("file/path/here/B.txt", "w");
if (g == NULL) {
printf("Write error.\n");
fclose(g);
return -2;
}
int line = 1; // first line in output file
while (!feof(f)) { // not end-of-file
char number[1000];
int i = 0;
for (i = 0; i <= 4; i++)
if (fscanf(f, "%s", number) == 1) { // one number read
fprintf(g, "%s", line + i, number);
}
line += i;
}
// close files
fclose(f);
fclose(g);
return 0;
}
When I run this in Code::Blocks, I get the 'Segmentation fault (core dumped) Process returned 139' message. I suspect that the problem lies in the 'if' statement and my use of formats. Needless to say, I'm relatively new to C. How might I fix this?
The simple reason for your segmentation fault is expression fprintf(g, "%s", line + i, number);, in which you state to pass a pointer to a string (i.e. char*), but actually pass a number (i.e. line + i); hence, the value of line + i, which is probably 1, ..., is interpreted as a pointer to memory address 1, which is not allowed to be addressed. It is as if you wrote fprintf(g, "%s", 1), which crashes, too;
So basically change this expression into fprintf(g, "%s", number);, and it should at least not crash (unless you have numbers with more than 999 digits).
There are some other issues in your code, e.g. that you open B.txt for write and assign it to g, but then you test and close the file using variable f.
But maybe above "crash solution" brings you forward, such that you can work further on your own. Note that - if B.txt failed opening, then your code would also have crashed because of passing NULL as file stream argument to fprintf.
The issue is with the use of fscanf and then fprintf.
fscanf knows how to parse a string into a number. E.g. fscanf(f, "%d", &var);. This reads a signed integer from the file handle f into the variable var. This can then be printed with fprintf.
As it stands, the first fscanf slurps the entire input into number (assuming that 1000 char is enough) and the following ones are not expected to be called

Making Input and Output files in C language according to the code?

This is a first formal C competition I am going through .In the last years paper they had- Specified something called aromatic number and told to find those .I wrote the code and it works well but I am not able to understand these instructions about input and output and how to code them in C for Windows.
I am aware about reading one letter from a file and writing it using fopen() and fprintf and fscanf. But these are letters written in different lines how to extract them as variables from in1.dat and print them in out1.dat?
Means I know
int main()
{
int n;
FILE *fptr;
if ((fptr=fopen("D:\\program.dat","r"))==NULL){
printf("Error! opening file");
exit(1); /* Program exits if file pointer returns NULL. */
}
fscanf(fptr,"%d",&n);
printf("Value of n=%d",n+n);
fclose(fptr);
getch();
}
Which scans the first value in the 1st line .But they ask for multiple lines(3 in sample input) how to do them?
fscanf(fptr,"%d",&n);
printf("Value of n=%d",n+n);
Instead do like this -
while(fscanf(fptr,"%d",&n))
{
printf("Value of n=%d",n+n); //But notice here with every iteration n will be over-written.
}
This will stop at the first conversion failure or end of the file.And then inside this loop you can write into output file .
Try Something Like This:
#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
FILE *in,*out;
int num;
char line[512],aronum[20];
in = fopen("in.dat", "r");
out = fopen("out.dat","w");
fgets(line, 512, in); //to get number of test cases
sscanf (line, "%d",&num);
while((fgets(line, 512, in) != NULL) && (num--))
{
sscanf (line, "%s",&aronum);
fprintf(out,"%d",calc(aronum)); //use `calc` func to return int ans.
}
fclose(in);
fclose(out);
return 0;
}

How to read text file in C?

I'm trying to read a txt file containing strings of 1s and 0s and print it out in the manner below. I tried my code a couple of months ago and it worked fine in reading the text file. Now when I tried it, it outputs something really strange. Also I tried changing the directory of the file to a non-existant file but it still outputs the same thing when it should've quit the program immediately. Please help!
The content of txt file:-
10000001
01110111
01111111
01111010
01111010
01110111
Expected output:-
data_in<=24'b10000001;
#10000;
Real output:-
data_in<=24'b(some weird symbol that changes everytime I recompile);
#10000;
My code:-
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
int i, j;
j = 0;
char words[50];
FILE *fp;
fp = fopen (argv[1], "r");
if (fp == NULL) {
printf ("Can't open file\n");
}
while (feof (fp) == 0) {
fscanf (fp, "%s", words);
printf ("data_in<=24'b%s\n", words);
printf ("#10000\n");
}
fclose (fp);
system ("PAUSE");
return 0;
}
The input argument is the following:-
"C:\Users\Beanz\Documents\MATLAB\football frame\frame1.txt"
Read each line one by one with getline(3) -if available- or with fgets (you'll then need a large enough line buffer, at least 256 bytes), then parse each line buffer appropriately, using sscanf (the %n might be useful, and you should test the scanned item count result of sscanf) or other functions (e.g. strtok, strtol, etc...)
Remember that 'feof()' is only set AFTER trying to read PAST the end of the file, not when at the end of the file.
So the final iteration through the loop will try to read/process data that contains trash or prior contents.
Always check the returned value from 'fscanf()' before trying to use the associated data.
strongly suggest
eliminate the call to feof() and use the fscanf() to control the loop

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