fscanf to structure array - c

Question

I'm trying to take some input from a text file, put it into a structure and print it out. The sample text file looks like this:
2
Curtis
660-------
Obama
2024561111
(Digits on the first number dashed out (for privacy), second is the Whitehouse.gov one, I called, they can't help me.)
Sample output:
204-456-1111 Obama
660--------- Curtis
(Formatting and sorting shouldn't be a problem when I figure out the rest.)
My question is labeled by the question marks below (in the first FOR loop, how do I get specific lines out of the text file to create the structures?
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
struct telephone {
char name[80];
long long int number;
}
main() {
struct telephone a, b;
char text[80];
int amount, i;
FILE *fp;
fp = fopen("phone.txt", "r");
fscanf(fp, "%d", amount);
struct telephone list[amount];
for(i = 0; i < amount; i++) {
strcpy(list[i].name, ???);
list[i].number, ???);
}
fclose(fp);
for(i = 0; i < amount; i++) {
DisplayStruct(list[i]);
}
}
DisplayStruct(struct telephone input) {
printf("%lld %s\n", input.number, input.name);
}

Answer 1

Use fgets to read one line at a time.
int lnum = 0;
char line[100];
while( fgets(line, sizeof(line), fp) ) {
lnum++;
printf( "Line %d : %s\n", lnum, line );
}
You can then use sscanf or strtok or numerous other approaches to pull data out of the string you just read.
I advise against storing your phone number as an integer. Phone numbers are better represented as strings.

Answer 2

If you can guarantee that neither names nor phone numbers have blanks in them, you can utilize fscanf() to read this data:
for(i = 0; i < amount; i++) {
fscanf("%s %lld", list[i].name, &list[i].phone);
}
Things to keep in mind:
You must check for conversion errors
This approach is less tolerant to input errors (in case of using fgets() it might be easier to recover and drop the malformed entry - unless the record has wrong number of fields).

Answer 3

Agree with #paddy, use a string to store phone numbers. (Cope with leading 0s, variant length, #, *, pause, etc.). Might as well also make sure it is big enough for a int64_t.
Note: The web has examples of 22 digits.
struct telephone {
char name[80];
char number[21];
}
To read in the data ...
for (i = 0; i < amount; i++) {
// +1 for buffer size as string read has a \n which is not stored.
char na[sizeof list[0].name + 1];
char nu[sizeof list[0].number + 1];
if ((fgets(na, sizeof na, fp) == NULL) || (fgets(nu, sizeof nu, fp) == NULL)) {
break; // TBD, Handle unexpected missing data
}
// The leading space in the format will skip leading white-spaces.
if (1 != sscanf(na, " %79[^\n]", list[i].name)) {
break; // TBD, Handle empty string
}
if (1 != sscanf(na, " %20[^\n]", list[i].number)) {
break; // TBD, Handle empty string
}
}
if (fgetc(fp) != EOF) {
; // Handle unexpected extra data
}
amount = i;
To write
// Pass address of structure
for(i = 0; i < amount; i++) {
DisplayStruct(&list[i]);
}
void DisplayStruct(const struct telephone *input) {
if (strlen(input->number) == 10) {
printf("%.3s-%.3s-%4s", input->number, &input->number[3], &input->number[6]);
}
else { // tbd format for unexpected telephone number length
printf("%13s", input->number);
}
// Suggest something around %s like \"%s\" to encapsulate names with spaces
printf(" %s\n", input->name);
}