Something weird using fgets - c

Question

If I'm printing the whole string everything looks good, whitespace and indenting looks perfect (I'm loading the source file with this code).
But if I'm trying to print a single character in the buffer I'm getting letters where there are not supposed to be any.
For example, if I print buffer[2] I'm getting letters where it should be whitespace, but if I print the whole string the letters aren't there.
Here is my code that's not working:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(void) {
char *buffer = (char*) malloc(100*sizeof(char));
FILE *myFile;
myFile = fopen("thisSourceFile.c", "r");
if (!myFile) {
printf("could not open file");
}
else {
while(fgets(buffer,100,myFile)) {
printf("%c \n",buffer[2]);
}
}
fclose(myFile);
free(buffer);
buffer = NULL;
return 0;
}
OUTPUT:
n
n
n
t
h
I
y
f
p
l
w
p
}
r
u
e
As you can se it is printing letters where it should by whitespace. Those letters are not there if I print the whole string.

Answer 1

If you're interested in parsing a source file and processing each character, this might be a solution.
But there are two constants; charsand num_lines_to_read.
M.M mentions in the comments below that isprint() isn't fully portable and comes with some quirks to be careful of.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <ctype.h>
int main(void) {
const int chars = 100; /* Num chars per line to read */
const int num_lines_to_read = 3; /* Num lines to read */
char *buffer = (char*) malloc(chars*sizeof(char));
int i = 0, j = 0;
FILE *myFile;
myFile = fopen("thisSourceFile.c", "r");
if (myFile == NULL) {
printf("could not open file");
fclose(myFile);
return 1;
}
for(i=0; i<num_lines_to_read; i++)
{
if(fgets(buffer,chars,myFile) != NULL)
{
while(isprint((unsigned char) buffer[j]))
{
printf("%c", (buffer[j]));
j++;
}
j=0;
}
}
fclose(myFile);
free(buffer);
return 0;
}
Example output (itself!):
#include <stdio.h>#include <stdlib.h>#include <ctype.h>