Remove empty new line at the end of a file - c

I have a file that's storing strings from the user's input (stdin)
However there are 2 situations
If I read it normally, my file will have an empty line at its end due to the newline from the last string the user introduced.
If I remove the \n from the input string, the file stores all strings in the same line, which is not wanted.
How can I simply remove that newline from the end of the file?
I can edit and provide some of my code if required.
EDIT: Let's say the last line of a file I already have is "cards"
when the cursor is in front of "cards", if I press the down arrow it doesn't go on to the next line, while in this case it can happen once.
For my code to function perfectly I can't let that happen,
Here's an example of what I have:
f=fopen(somefile, "w");
do
{
fgets(hobby, 50, stdin);
fprintf(f, "%s", hobby)
} while(strcmp(hobby,"\n") != 0);

The newline character1 at the end of the file is part of the last line. Removing it is possible but makes the last line incomplete, which will break many programs. For example, concatenating another file at the end of this file will cause the last line to be merged with the first line of the concatenated file.
A Yuri Laguardia commented, if you later reopen this file in append mode to write more lines, the first one added would be concatenated at the end of this last incomplete line. Probably not the intended behavior.
If you do not want the file to contain empty lines, check user input before writing the line into the file:
void input_file_contents(FILE *fp) {
char userinput[80];
printf("enter file contents:\n");
while (fgets(userinput, sizeof userinput, stdin)) {
if (*userinput != '\n') {
fputs(userinput, fp);
}
}
}
EDIT:
Your code does not test for termination at the right place: you write the empty line before the test. Do not use a do / while loop:
f = fopen(somefile, "w");
if (f != NULL) {
/* read lines until end of file or empty line */
while (fgets(hobby, 50, stdin) != NULL && *hobby != '\n') {
fputs(hobby, f);
}
}
1 The newline character is actually a pair of bytes <CR><LF> on legacy systems.

Related

fopen failing on variable filepath

This function is passed the path of a text file(mapper_path) which contains paths to other text files on each line. I am supposed to open the mapper_path.txt file, then open and evaluate each of the paths within it (example in output).
fopen succeeds on the mapper_path file but fails on the paths which it contains.
In the failure condition, it prints the EXACT path I'm trying to open.
I'm working in C on windows and running commands on Ubuntu subsystem.
How can I properly read and store the sub-path into a variable to open it?
SOLVED with Rici's suggestion!
int processText(char * mapper_path, tuple * letters[])
{
char line[LINE_SIZE];
char txt_path[MAX_PATH];
FILE * mapper_fp = fopen(mapper_path, "r");
if(!mapper_fp)
{
printf("Failed to open mapper path: %s \n", mapper_path);
return -1;
}
//!!! PROBLEM IS HERE !!!
while(fgets(txt_path, MAX_PATH, mapper_fp))
{
//remove newline character from end
txt_path[strlen(txt_path)-1] = 0;
//open each txt file path, return -1 if it fails
FILE* fp = fopen(txt_path, "r");
if(!fp)
{
printf("Failed to open file path:%s\n", txt_path);
return -1;
}
//...more unimportant code
prints:
Failed to open filepath:
/mnt/c/users/adam/documents/csci_4061/projects/blackbeards/testtext.txt
This is the exact path of the file i am trying to open.
I suspect that the problem is related to this:
I'm working in C on windows and running commands on Ubuntu subsystem.
Presumably, you created the mapper.txt file using Windows tools, so it has Windows line endings. However, I think the Ubuntu subsystem does not know about Windows line endings, and so even though you open the file in mode 'r', it does not translate CR-LF into a single \n. When you then remove the \n at the end of the input, you still leave the \r.
That \r won't be visible when you print out the line, since all it does is move the cursor to the beginning of the line and the next character output is a \n. It's usually a good idea to surround strings with other text when you print debugging messages, since that can give you a clue about this sort of problem. If you'd used:
printf("Failed to open file path: '%s'\n", txt_path);
you might have seen the error:
'ailed to open filepath: '/mnt/c/users/adam/documents/csci_4061/projects/blackbeards/testtext.txt
Here, the hint that there is a \r at the end of the string is the overwriting of the first character of the message with the trailing apostrophe.
It's not quite accurate to say that fgets "adds a \n character to the end [of the line read]." It's more accurate to say that it doesn't remove that character, if it is present. It is quite possible that there isn't a newline at the end of the line. The line may be the last line in a text file which doesn't end with a newline character, for example. Or the fgets might have been terminated by reaching the character limit you supplied, rather than by finding a newline character.
So you are certainly better off using the getline interface, which has two advantages: (a) it allocates storage for the line itself, so you don't need to guess a maximum length in advance, and (b) it tells you exactly how many characters it read, so you don't have to count them.
Using that information, you can then remove a \n which happens to be at the end of the line, if there is one, and then remove the preceding \r, if there is one:
char* line = NULL;
size_t n_line = 0;
for (;;) {
ssize_t n_read = getline(&line, &n_line, mapper_fp);
if (n_read < 0) break; /* EOF or some kind of read error */
if (n_read > 0 && line[n_read - 1] == '\n')
line[nread--] = 0;
if (n_read > 0 && line[n_read - 1] == '\r')
line[nread--] = 0;
if (nread == 0) continue; /* blank line */
/* Handle the line read */
}
if (ferr(mapper_fp))
perror("Error reading mapper file");
free(line);

fgets function and file handling in C

I am trying to make a program which will store the data entered by the user in a text file whose name is provided by the user. Program will terminate when the user enters exit. strcmp function of string.h is used for string comparison and fgets() is used to read data from stdin.
Here is my code.
#include<stdio.h>
#include<string.h>
void main()
{
char file[60]; // will store file name
printf("Enter file name: ");
fgets(file, 59, stdin);
FILE *fp = fopen(file, "a+"); // open file in append mode
if(fp == NULL){
printf("File not found !");
return;
}
char data[100];
printf("Enter some data to add to file(exit to terminate): ");
fgets(data, 99, stdin);
int flag = strcmp(data, "exit");
while(flag != 0){
fputs(data, fp);
fgets(data, 59, stdin);
flag = strcmp(data, "exit");
printf("%d\n", flag); // for checking whether string are correctly comapred or not
}
printf("Bye");
}
Program does not terminate even if i enter exit. I have also tried concatenating "\n" at the end of string input by user but that also doesn't help. Although, gets() function works fine, but i know it is not preferred to use to I shifted to fgets() but it doesn't work for me.
Check the man page for fgets(), it reads and stores the newline (caused by pressing ENTER) after the entered input. Thus, the strcmp() fails.
You have to manually strip the input buffer off the newline, before you can compare the input. A simple yet elegant way of doing that would be
data[strcspn(data, "\n")] = 0;
fgets reads in a complete "line", i.e. a sequence of characters until (and including!) a new line character. Hence, when a user presses "Enter", the new line will be part of the string read in and a strcmp(data,"exit") will evaluate to "not equal".
So either strip off the new line before comparison, or compare with a string literal including a new line. Since you write the data as is(i.e. including the new lines) to a file, it seems cumbersome to first strip the new line off and add it then in the output manually. So I'd actually suggest the second approach:
fgets(data, 100, stdin);
flag = strcmp(data, "exit\n");
An alternative would be to use strstr if excess characters do not matter (i.e. your program would exit if the user types "exit" or "asdfexitasdf". - both of which contain "exit".)
So
int flag = strstr(data, "exit");
if(flag != NULL)
//exit the program
else
//stay in the program

Replacing lines in a text file with C

I have a configuration file that I need to alter.
The structure of the file is:
resolution 12x34
interval 1234
So two strings with a whitespace delimiter. The code I use to alter it is this:
FILE *fp = fopen(configuration_file, "a+");
char str[100], key[100], value[100];
if(fp) {
while(fgets(str, 100, fp) != NULL) {
if(2 == sscanf(str, "%s %s", &key, &value)) {
if(strcmp(key, "resolution") == 0){
if(msg->resolution){
fprintf(fp, "%s %s\r\n", key, msg->resolution);
}
} else if(strcmp(key, "interval") == 0) {
if(msg->interval) {
fprintf(fp, "%s %d\r\n", key, msg->interval);
}
} else {
fputs(str, fp);
}
} else {
fputs(str, fp);
}
}
} else {
(void)printf("-- Configuration file not found (%s)\r\n --", configuration_file);
}
fclose(fp);
The idea was to read it line by line. According to the documentation for fgets says that it stops at newlines. String-scan each line and parse them into a key and value. So far so good, acting as expected. And then print the new line to the file, overwriting the line it had just scanned. This is where the problem comes in. If I use fprintf, only the first value, resolution, is processed. The result of it is:
resolution oldxres
resolution newxres
It overwrites the wrong line and skips the second entirely.
If I remove the fprintf and instead simply print the values it has found, it prints both as it is supposed to.
What am I missing here? Does fprintf push the file pointer?
And then print the new line to the file, overwriting the line it had just scanned.
Files don't work this way. Write to a new file. When finished, rename the new file to the old name. Alternatively, read the entire file into memory, change the contents in memory, then write it back.
You can rewrite individual lines is if the modified line never becomes longer than the original one. Otherwise the modified line will spill over the next line you have not read yet, and destroy it. In order to prevent this you would need some kind of look-ahead buffer, which is just too cumbersome and error-prone. In the worst case you'd need to read the entire file anyway.

Reading lines ahead in a file (In C)

I have a file that looks like this:
This is the first line in the file
This is the third line in the file
Where I have a blank line in the file (On line 2). I want to read the file line by line (Which I do using fgets), but then i want to read ahead just check if a line there is a blank line in the file.
However, My while fgetshas a break statement in it, because my function is only so posed to read the file a line at a time per function call.
so if I call the function:
func(file);
It would read the first line, then break.
If I called it again, it would read the second line then break, etc.
Because I have to implement it this way, it's hard to read ahead, is there any way I can accomplish this?
This is my code:
int main(void) {
FILE * file;
if(file == NULL){perror("test.txt"); return EXIT_FAILURE;}
readALine(file);
}
void readALine(FILE * file) {
char buffer[1000];
while(fgets(buffer,sizeof(buffer),file) != NULL) {
//Read lines ahead to check if there is a line
//which is blank
break; //only read a line each FUNCTION CALL
}
}
So to clarify, if I WAS reading the entire file at once (Only one function call) it would go like this (Which is easy to implement).
int main(void) {
FILE * file = fopen("test.txt","r");
if(file == NULL){perror("test.txt"); return EXIT_FAILURE;}
readALine(file);
}
void readALine(FILE * file) {
char buffer[1000];
while(fgets(buffer,sizeof(buffer),file) != NULL) {
if(isspace(buffer[0]) {
printf("Blank line found\n");
}
}
}
But since I'm reading the file in (Line by line, per function call), The second piece of code above wouldn’t work (Since I break per line read, which I can't change).
Is there a way I could use fseek to accomplish this?
A while loop ending in an unconditional break is an if statement, so I don't really see why you are using a while loop. I'm also assuming you are not worried about a single line being longer than 1000 chars.
the continue statement jumps over to the next iteration of the loop and checks the condition again.
void readALine(FILE * file) {
char buffer[1000];
while(fgets(buffer,sizeof(buffer),file) != NULL) {
if(!isspace(buffer[0]) { //note the not operator
//I'm guessing isspace checks for a newline character since otherwise this will be true also for lines beginning with space
continue; //run the same loop again
}
break;
}
//buffer contains the next line except for empty ones here...
}
You can "read ahead" by simply storing your position in the file (with position = ftell(your_file)), then read the line, if this is a blank line do whatever you have to do, and finally go back to the position you were (with fseek(your_file, position, SEEK_SET)).
Hope this helps !
The while loop in readALine reads lines until the end of the file. So it will skip blank lines, and all other lines.
You can return from within the loop if you've found a non-blank line:
while(fgets(buffer,sizeof(buffer),file) != NULL) {
if (buffer[0] != '\n')
return;
}
If you also want to skip lines that consist of nothing but spaces, you can write a function that does that check:
bool isNothingButWhitespace(char *s) {
while (*s == ' ' || *s == '\n')
s++;
return *s == '\0';
}
This will find the first character that's not whitespace. If it's the string terminator '\0' then it will return true (the string was nothing but whitespace) otherwise falseS (there was some non-whitespace character found).
If the while loop in readALine completes due to it reaching the end of file, you need some way to signal that back to the caller. I recommend setting buffer[0] = '\0'.

C, reading a multiline text file

I know this is a dumb question, but how would I load data from a multiline text file?
while (!feof(in)) {
fscanf(in,"%s %s %s \n",string1,string2,string3);
}
^^This is how I load data from a single line, and it works fine. I just have no clue how to load the same data from the second and third lines.
Again, I realize this is probably a dumb question.
Edit: Problem not solved. I have no idea how to read text from a file that's not on the first line. How would I do this? Sorry for the stupid question.
Try something like:
/edited/
char line[512]; // or however large you think these lines will be
in = fopen ("multilinefile.txt", "rt"); /* open the file for reading */
/* "rt" means open the file for reading text */
int cur_line = 0;
while(fgets(line, 512, in) != NULL) {
if (cur_line == 2) { // 3rd line
/* get a line, up to 512 chars from in. done if NULL */
sscanf (line, "%s %s %s \n",string1,string2,string3);
// now you should store or manipulate those strings
break;
}
cur_line++;
}
fclose(in); /* close the file */
or maybe even...
char line[512];
in = fopen ("multilinefile.txt", "rt"); /* open the file for reading */
fgets(line, 512, in); // throw out line one
fgets(line, 512, in); // on line 2
sscanf (line, "%s %s %s \n",string1,string2,string3); // line 2 is loaded into 'line'
// do stuff with line 2
fgets(line, 512, in); // on line 3
sscanf (line, "%s %s %s \n",string1,string2,string3); // line 3 is loaded into 'line'
// do stuff with line 3
fclose(in); // close file
Putting \n in a scanf format string has no different effect from a space. You should use fgets to get the line, then sscanf on the string itself.
This also allows for easier error recovery. If it were just a matter of matching the newline, you could use "%*[ \t]%*1[\n]" instead of " \n" at the end of the string. You should probably use %*[ \t] in place of all your spaces in that case, and check the return value from fscanf. Using fscanf directly on input is very difficult to get right (what happens if there are four words on a line? what happens if there are only two?) and I would recommend the fgets/sscanf solution.
Also, as Delan Azabani mentioned... it's not clear from this fragment whether you're not already doing so, but you have to either define space [e.g. in a large array or some dynamic structure with malloc] to store the entire dataset, or do all your processing inside the loop.
You should also be specifying how much space is available for each string in the format specifier. %s by itself in scanf is always a bug and may be a security vulnerability.
First off, you don't use feof() like that...it shows a probable Pascal background, either in your past or in your teacher's past.
For reading lines, you are best off using either POSIX 2008 (Linux) getline() or standard C fgets(). Either way, you try reading the line with the function, and stop when it indicates EOF:
while (fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), fp) != 0)
{
...use the line of data in buffer...
}
char *bufptr = 0;
size_t buflen = 0;
while (getline(&bufptr, &buflen, fp) != -1)
{
...use the line of data in bufptr...
}
free(bufptr);
To read multiple lines, you need to decide whether you need previous lines available as well. If not, a single string (character array) will do. If you need the previous lines, then you need to read into an array, possibly an array of dynamically allocated pointers.
Every time you call fscanf, it reads more values. The problem you have right now is that you're re-reading each line into the same variables, so in the end, the three variables have the last line's values. Try creating an array or other structure that can hold all the values you need.
The best way to do this is to use a two dimensional array and and just write each line into each element of the array. Here is an example reading from a .txt file of the poem Ozymandias:
int main() {
char line[15][255];
FILE * fpointer = fopen("ozymandias.txt", "rt");
for (int a = 0; a < 15; a++) {
fgets(line[a], 255, fpointer);
}
for (int b = 0; b < 15; b++) {
printf("%s", line[b]);
}
return 0;
This produces the poem output. Notice that the poem is 14 lines long, it is more difficult to print out a file whose length you do not know because reading a blank line will produce the output "x�oA". Another issue is if you check if the next line is null by writing
while (fgets(....) != NULL)) {
each line will be skipped. You could try going back a line each time to solve this but i think this solution is fine for all intents.
I have an even EASIER solution with no confusing snippets of puzzling methods (no offense to the above stated) here it is:
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string line;//read the line
ifstream myfile ("MainMenu.txt"); // make sure to put this inside the project folder with all your .h and .cpp files
if (myfile.is_open())
{
while ( myfile.good() )
{
getline (myfile,line);
cout << line << endl;
}
myfile.close();
}
else cout << "Unable to open file";
return 0;
}
Happy coding

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