I am currently writing a program in c that requires me to read a text file more than once. That is, I am reading the data from the first line of the text file (which is fine), but then want to go back and re-read the same data from the same first line of the text file again (my problem). The data on the text file are simple numbers spaced out such that they may be read with scanf. I am a beginner and would appreciate some help. If it is in fact not possible to do this using scanf what can I do in order to solve my problem?
you can use rewind(FILE *stream) it is equivalent to:
fseek(stream, 0, SEEK_SET)
which sets the file position indicator for the stream pointed to by stream to the beginning of the file
Related
Is it possible to write at the middle of a file for example I want to insert some string at the 5th position in the 2nd line of a file in c ?
I'm not very familiar with some of C functions that are related to handling files , if someone could help me I would appreciate it
I tried using fputs but I couldn't insert characters at the desired location
open a new output file
read the input file line by line (fgets) writing each line out to a new file as you read.
When you hit the place you want to insert write the new line(s)
The carry on copy the old lines to the new file
close input and output
rename output file to input
Continuing from my comments above. Here's what I'd do:
Create two large, static char[] buffers of the same size--each large enough to store the largest file you could possibly ever need to read in (ex: 10 MiB). Ex:
#define MAX_FILE_SIZE_10_MIB (10*1024*1024)
static char buffer_file_in[MAX_FILE_SIZE_10_MIB];
static char buffer_file_out[MAX_FILE_SIZE_10_MIB];
Use fopen(filename, "r+") to open the file as read/update. See: https://cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/fopen/. Read the chars one-by-one using fgetc() (see my file_load() function for how to use fgetc()) into the first large char buffer you created, buffer_file_in. Continue until you've read the whole file into that buffer.
Find the location of the place you'd like to do the insertion. Note: you could do this live as you read the file into buffer_file_in the first time by counting newline chars ('\n') to see what line you are on. Copy chars from buffer_file_in to buffer_file_out up to that point. Now, write your new contents into buffer_file_out at that point. Then, finish copying the rest of buffer_file_in into buffer_file_out after your inserted chars.
Seek to the beginning of the file with fseek(file_pointer, 0, SEEK_SET);
Write the buffer_file_out buffer contents into the file with fwrite().
Close the file with fclose().
There are some optimizations you could do here, such as storing the index where you want to begin your insertion, and not copying the chars up to that point into buffer_file_in, but rather, simply copying the remaining of the file after that into buffer_file_in, and then seeking to that point later and writing only your new contents plus the rest of the file. This avoids unnecessarily rewriting the very beginning of the fie prior to the insertion point is all.
(Probably preferred) you could also just copy the file and the changes you insert straight into buffer_file_out in one shot, then write that back to the file starting at the beginning of the file. This would be very similar to #pm100's approach, except using 1 file + 1 buffer rather than 2 files.
Look for other optimizations and reductions of redundancy as applicable.
My approach above uses 1 file and 1 or 2 buffers in RAM, depending on implementation. #pm100's approach uses 2 files and 0 buffers in RAM (very similar to what my 1 file and 1 buffer approach would look like), depending on implementation. Both approaches are valid.
How can I insert characters in a file using C instead of overwriting? I also want to write in start of file and end of a file. I tried this method but it didn't work out (I can re-position but I cannot insert. The text is overwritten)
I've tried this, but it didn't work:
fword = fopen("wrote.txt", "rb+");
fseek(fword, 0, SEEK_SET);
fscanf(fword, "%c", &l);
To add text at the end, you can open the file with "a" mode (check the fopen manual). It will write your text to end.
To add text in other positions, you have to read everything after that to memory, write what you want and then write the rest.
Files are abstractions of byte streams, there is no such concept as insert in a byte stream, you can seek into certain place and write data there. The bytes you wrote will lay in the file as an array of bytes, if the writing exceeds the current file size, the file will be extended.
I want to do the following:
open and read and ASCII file
locate a substring (geographical coordinates)
create its replacement (apply corrections to the original coordinates)
overwrite the original substring (write in the original file the corrected coordinates).
The format of the ASCII file is:
$GPGGA,091306.00,4548.17420,N,00905.47990,E,1,09,0.87,233.5,M,47.2,M,,*53
I will paste here only the part of the code that is responsible for this operation:
opnmea = fopen (argv[1], "r+");
if (fgets(row_nmea, ROW, opnmea)==NULL){
if (strstr(row_nmea,"$GPGGA")!=NULL) {
sscanf(row_nmea+17, "%10c", old_phi);
sscanf(row_nmea+30, "%11c", old_lam);
sscanf(row_nmea+54, "%5c", old_h);
fputs();
}
}
What I do till now is to extract in a variable the old coordinates and I was thinking to use fputs() for overwriting the old with new values. But I could not do it. The other part of the code that is not here is computing the correct coordinates. My idea is to correct the rows one by one, as the fgets() function reads each line.
I would appreciate very much any suggestion that can show me how to use fputs() or another function to complete my work. I am looking for something simple as I am beginner with C.
Thank you in advance.
Patching a text file in place is not a good solution for this problem, for multiple reasons:
the modified version might have a different length, hence patching cannot be done in place.
the read-write operation of standard streams is not so easy to handle correctly and defeats the buffering mechanism.
if you encounter an error during the patching phase, a partially modified file can be considered corrupted as one cannot tell which coordinates have been modified and which have not.
other programs might be reading from the same file as you are writing it. They will read invalid or inconsistent data.
I strongly recommend to write a program that reads the original file and writes a modified version to a different output file.
For this you need to:
open the original file for reading opnmea = fopen(argv[1], "r");
open the output file for writing: outfile = fopen(temporary_file_name, "w");
copy the lines that do not require modification: just call fputs(row_nmea, outfile).
parse relevant data in lines that require modification with whatever method you are comfortable with: sscanf, strtok, ...
compute the modified fields and write the modified line to outfile with fprintf.
Once the file has been completely and correctly handled, you can replace the original file with rename. The rename operation is usually atomic at the file-system level, so other programs will either finish reading from the previous version or open the new version.
Of course, if the file has only one line, you could simply rewind the stream and write back the line with fprintf, but this is a special case and it will fail if the new version is shorter than the original. Truncating the extra data is not easy. An alternative is to reopen the file in write mode ("w") before writing the modified line.
I would recommend strtok(), followed by your revision, followed by strcat().
strtok() will let you separate the line using the comma as a delimiter, so you will get the field you want reliably. You can break up the line into separate strings, revise the coordinates you wish, and reassemble the line, including the commas, with strcat().
These pages include nice usage examples, too:
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstring/strtok/
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstring/strcat/?kw=strcat
I want to read one line of the text file, save it to a buffer, send the buffer over a udp socket and then go and read the second line and so on..
So far, since I knew the data type of the text to be read from the text file, I had been using
fscanf()
to read each line from the text file. But now I don't know the data types so it is not possible for me to use this function anymore. Is there any other way to read text file line by line.
Note: The length of each line may vary.
Here is a handy code I found to read data as binary
FILE *fp;
fp=fopen("c:\\test.bin", "r");
char *x = new char[10];
//size_t fread(void *ptr, size_t size_of_elements, size_t number_of_elements, FILE *a_file);
fread(x, sizeof(x[0]), sizeof(x)/sizeof(x[0]), fp);
Without knowing the data type you can never know what you're going to read into your variables... Let's see, you mention that the length of each line may vary, right?. So we can assume that your text file contains... text. That is, the the number 128 would not be represented by a single integer, but by three chars that you would read and then parse into an integer.
That said, there's not a lot of options there but to build a parser (you read each line and try to guess what it is based on the chars you've read, say, are there only numbers?, are there only numbers but there's a dot? are there only a-z characters?, are they both?) that would't be 100% reliable or just try to always know the data type beforehand (say, save the first char that you read from each line for the data type when writing the file).
A very different story goes on if your text file is not really in text, but in binary mode. If that's the case... well, there's nothing to do but knowing the data types beforehand.
hello i got a problem with reading from a file, i am trying to read from a file using fscanf() and i cant seem to sort it out.
i try to read the file line by line and putting the string in a variable (buffer) each time but i cant understand how the while loop is suppose to be looking like
thanks in advance
the file that i want to read from is a txt file with this format: first line :"1234,abc,etc" second line : "2432,fjh,etc" and more lines like those i want to be able to use the fscanf method inorder to put in each loop the all line lets say "1234,abc,etc" in my string variable and so on till i dont have any more lines to read from
this is what i managed to gather so far (ofc its not the currect way to write it):
char* buffer[100];
while (fscanf(FILE *finput,"%s",buffer)!=something)
{
printf("%s",buffer);
}
i want this code to be able to print all of the lines in my code if you would be able to correct my errors i will greatly appriciate it
I feel like you should read some of these great topics first:
Trouble reading a line using fscanf()
Reading file using fscanf() in C
fscanf multiple lines [c++]
There are plenty of reasons why you should use fgets or something else instead.
Quoting from this place:
fscanf() is a field oriented function and is inappropriate for use in a robust, general-purpose text file reader. It has two major drawbacks:
You must know the exact data layout of the input file in advance and rewrite the function call for every different layout.
It's difficult to read text strings that contain spaces because fscanf() sees space characters as field delimiters.
If you know the size of file you're trying to read, you could use fread(), which is block oriented.