Segfault resulting from strdup and strtok - c

Question

I've been assigned a homework from my college professor and I seem to have found some strange behavior of strtok
Basically, we have to parse a CSV file for my class, where the number of tokens in the CSV is known and the last element may have extra "," characters.
An example of a line:
Hello,World,This,Is,A lot, of Text
Where the tokens should be output as
1. Hello
2. World
3. This
4. Is
5. A lot, of Text
For this assignment we MUST use strtok. Because of this I found on some other SOF post that using strtok with an empty string (or passing "\n" as the second argument) results in reading until the end of the line. This is perfect for my application since the extra commas always appear in the last element.
I've created this code which works:
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#define NUM_TOKENS 5
const char *line = "Hello,World,This,Is,Text";
char **split_line(const char *line, int num_tokens)
{
char *copy = strdup(line);
// Make an array the correct size to hold num_tokens
char **tokens = (char**) malloc(sizeof(char*) * num_tokens);
int i = 0;
for (char *token = strtok(copy, ",\n"); i < NUM_TOKENS; token = strtok(NULL, i < NUM_TOKENS - 1 ? ",\n" : "\n"))
{
tokens[i++] = strdup(token);
}
free(copy);
return tokens;
}
int main()
{
char **tokens = split_line(line, NUM_TOKENS);
for (int i = 0; i < NUM_TOKENS; i++)
{
printf("%s\n", tokens[i]);
free(tokens[i]);
}
}
Now this works and should get me full credit but I hate this ternary that shouldn't be needed:
token = strtok(NULL, i < NUM_TOKENS - 1 ? ",\n" : "\n");
I'd like to replace the method with this version:
char **split_line(const char *line, int num_tokens)
{
char *copy = strdup(line);
// Make an array the correct size to hold num_tokens
char **tokens = (char**) malloc(sizeof(char*) * num_tokens);
int i = 0;
for (char *token = strtok(copy, ",\n"); i < NUM_TOKENS - 1; token = strtok(NULL, ",\n"))
{
tokens[i++] = strdup(token);
}
tokens[i] = strdup(strtok(NULL, "\n"));
free(copy);
return tokens;
}
This tickles my fancy much nicer since it is much easier to see that there is a final case. You also get rid of the strange ternary operator.
Sadly though, this segfaults! I can't for the life of me figure out why.
Edit: Add some output examples:
[11:56:06] gravypod:test git:(master*) $ ./test_no_fault
Hello
World
This
Is
Text
[11:56:10] gravypod:test git:(master*) $ ./test_seg_fault
[1] 3718 segmentation fault (core dumped) ./test_seg_fault
[11:56:14] gravypod:test git:(master*) $

Answer 1

Please check the return value from strtok before you risk passing NULL to another function. Your loop is calling strtok one more time than you think.
It is more usual to use this return value to control your loop, then you are not at the mercy of your data. As for the delimitors, best to keep it simple and not try anything fancy.
char **split_line(const char *line, int num_tokens)
{
char *copy = strdup(line);
char **tokens = (char**) malloc(sizeof(char*) * num_tokens);
int i = 0;
char *token;
char delim1[] = ",\r\n";
char delim2[] = "\r\n";
char *delim = delim1; // start with a comma in the delimiter set
token = strtok(copy, delim);
while(token != NULL) { // strtok result comtrols the loop
tokens[i++] = strdup(token);
if(i == NUM_TOKENS) {
delim = delim2; // change the delimiters
}
token = strtok(NULL, delim);
}
free(copy);
return tokens;
}
Note you should also check the return values from malloc and strdup and free your memory properly

Answer 2

When you get to the last loop, you'll get
for (char *token = strtok(copy, ",\n"); i < NUM_TOKENS - 1; token = strtok(NULL, ",\n"))
loop body
loop increment step, i.e. token = strtok(NULL, ",\n") (with the wrong second arg)
loop continuation check i < NUM_TOKENS - 1
i.e. it has still called strtok even though you're now out-of-range. You've also got an off-by-one on your array indices here: you'd want to initialise i=0 not 1.
You could avoid this by e.g.
making the initial strtok a special case outside the loop, e.g.
int i = 0;
tokens[i++] = strdup(strtok(copy, ",\n"));
then moving the strtok(NULL, ",\n") inside the loop
I'm also surprised you want the \n there at all, or even need to call the last strtok (wouldn't that already just point to the rest of the string? If you just trying to chop a trailing newline there are easier ways) but I haven't used strtok in years.
(As an aside you're also not freeing the malloced array you store the string pointers in. That said since it's the end of the program at that point that doesn't matter so much.)

Answer 3

Remember that strtok identifies a token when it finds any of the characters in the delimiter string (the second argument to strtok()) - it doesn't try to match the entire delimiter string itself.
Thus, the ternary operator was never needed in the first place - the string will be tokenized based on the occurrence of , OR \n in the input string, so the following works:
for (token = strtok(copy, ",\n"); i < NUM_TOKENS; token = strtok(NULL, ",\n"))
{
tokens[i++] = strdup(token);
}
The second example segfaults because it's already tokenized the input to the end of the string by the time it exits the for loop. Calling strtok() again sets token to NULL, and the segfault is generated when strdup() is called on the NULL pointer. Removing the extra call to strtok gives the expected results:
for (token = strtok(copy, ",\n"); i < NUM_TOKENS - 1; token = strtok(NULL, ",\n"))
{
tokens[i++] = strdup(token);
}
tokens[i] = strdup(token);