trouble using fread in c - c

Im having some trouble figuring out how to properly format fread statements. The below code is just some randomn stuff Im practicing with. Basically it fills information into the first array (s), writes 's' to a file, and then reads the file into the second array (s2). However I can't seem to get the fread statement formated in a way that doesnt give an error or return garbage. The arrays are in char datatype because, if my understanding is correct, char uses less memory than other datatypes. The eventual application of this practice code is for a data compression project.
#include<stdio.h>
#include<string.h>
FILE *fp;
//file pointer
char s[56];
//first string
char s2[56];
//target string for the fread
int n=0;
//counting variable
int m=0;
int main (void)
{
fp=fopen("test.bin", "w+");
//open a file for reading and writing
strcpy(s, "101010001101010");
//input for the string
for(n=0;n<56;n++)
{
if(s[n]==1)
m=n;
else if(s[n]==0)
m=n;
}
printf("%d\n", m);
//the above for loop finds how many elements in 's' are filled with 1's and 0's
for(n=0;n<m;n++)
{
printf("%c", s[n]);
}
//for loop to print 's'
fwrite(s, m, 1, fp);
//writes 's' to the first file
s2=fread(&s2, m, 1, fp);
//an attempt to use fread...
printf("\n\ns2\n\n");
for(n=0;n<m;n++)
{
printf("%c", s2[n]);
}
printf("\n");
//for loop to print 's2'
fclose(fp);
printf("\n\n");
printf("press any number to close program\n");
scanf("%d", &m);
}

A FILE structure has an implicit seek position within the file. You read and write from that seek position. If you want to read what you have written, you need to change the seek position back to the beginning of the file with a call to fseek(). In fact, for a file open for reading and writing, you must call fseek() when switching between reading and writing.

The return value of the fread function is of type size_t. It is the number of elements successfully read. (reference: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/fread/)
Don't assign it to s2. Simply use fread(&s2, m, 1, fp);

Related

Read from a .txt file and save it in an array.Trouble with fscanf

I want read from a .txt file which contains english sentences and store them into a character array. Each character by character. I tried but got segmentation fault:11 . I have trouble with fscanf and reading from a file in C.
#include<stdio.h>
#include<math.h>
#include<limits.h>
int main()
{
FILE* fp = fopen("file1.txt","r");
char c , A[INT_MAX];
int x;
while(1)
{
fscanf("fp,%c",&c);
if(c == EOF)
{break;}
A[x] = c;
x++;
}
int i;
for (i=0;i<x;i++)
printf("%c",A[i]);
return 0;
}
Problem 1: Putting the array onto the stack as A[INT_MAX] is bad practice; it allocates an unreasonable amount of space on the stack (and will crash on machines where INT_MAX is large relative to the size of memory). Get the file size, then malloc space for it.
fseek(fp, SEEK_END);
long size = ftell(fp);
rewind(fp);
char *A = malloc((size_t) size); // assumes size_t and long are the same size
if (A == NULL) {
// handle error
}
Problem 2: The fscanf is wrong. If you insist on using fscanf (which is not a good way to read an entire file; see problem 4), you should change:
fscanf("fp,%c",&c);`
should be
int count = fscanf(fp, "%c",&c);
if (count <= 0)
break;
Problem 3: Your x counter is not initialized. If you insist on using fscanf, you'd need to initialize it:
int x = 0;
Problem 4: The fscanf is the wrong way to read the entire file. Assuming you've figured out how large the file is (see problem 1), you should read the file with an fread, like this:
int bytes_read = fread(A, 1, size, fp);
if (bytes_read < size) {
// something went wrong
}
My initial answer, and a good general rule:
You need to check the return value, because your c value can never be EOF, because EOF is an int value that doesn't fit into a char. (You should always check return values, even when it seems like errors shouldn't happen, but I haven't consistently done that in the code above.)
From http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/fscanf/ :
Return Value
On success, the function returns the number of items of the argument list successfully filled. This count can match the expected number of items or be less (even zero) due to a matching failure, a reading error, or the reach of the end-of-file.
If a reading error happens or the end-of-file is reached while reading, the proper indicator is set (feof or ferror). And, if either happens before any data could be successfully read, EOF is returned.
If an encoding error happens interpreting wide characters, the function sets errno to EILSEQ.
Hi you should declear till where the program should read data. You can access all characters even if you read line like a string.
try it out
#include<stdio.h>
#include<string.h>
#define INT_MAX 100
int main()
{
FILE* fp = fopen("file1.txt","r");
char c , A[INT_MAX];
int i;
int x;
j=0
while(fscanf(fp,"%s",A[j])!=EOF)
{
j++;
}
int i;
int q;
for(q=0;q<j;q++)
{
for (i=0;i<strlen(A[q]);i++)
printf("%c ",A[q][i]);
printf("\n");
}
return 0;
}

calculate mean length of a line using C

I have a text file which I have filled a number lines from different texts, having different line length.
What I want to do is calculate the average number characters per line which matters to me in my job. I wrote the following code in C to achieve this. However I cannot run the program once it is compiled.
#include<stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
#define LENGTH 10000000
int main()
{
char c;
int i;
int line_length;
int j;
int char_count;
char char_a[LENGTH];
int line_a[LENGTH];
int line_count;
long sum;
float avg_char_count;
FILE *fp=fopen("input.txt","r");
if(!fp){
fprintf(stderr,"cannot open file");
exit(1);
}
/*read into file*/
i=0;
sum=0;
while(char_a[i++]=fgetc(fp))
sum++;
printf("chars count: %d \n",sum);
/*process array*/
char_count=i;
j=0;
line_count=0;
while(j++<char_count){
if(char_a[j]=='\n'){
sum--;
line_count++;
}
}
/* calculate the average*/
avg_char_count=sum/(float)line_count;
printf("\naverage # of chars in a line is: %f\n ",avg_char_count);
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
By the way I am using Borland C++ command-line tool BCC32, running on Windows 7 SP1.
What's wrong with my code?
Try declaring char_a and line_a as pointers to char and int as:
char *char_a;
int *line_a;
And then allocate memory dynamically using malloc.
char_a=(char*)malloc(10000000*sizeof(char));
line_a=(int*)malloc(10000000*sizeof(int));
Secondly, your while loop should end when you reach end of file, i.e. EOF.
while(char_a[i]=fgetc(fp)){
if(char_a[i++]==EOF)
break;
sum++;
}
And, you should initialize the line_count to 1 instead of 0, because when there is no '\n' in the text file, there can still be one line. If there is one '\n' in the text file, it means there are two lines (say, you are in line 1, and then you hit enter, which is '\n', and then you get to the new line, so for one '\n', there are 2 lines).
/*process array*/
char_count=sum;
j=0;
line_count=1;
while(j++<char_count){
if(char_a[j]=='\n'){
sum--;
line_count++;
}
}
NOTE-Currently your char_count include newlines ('\n') when it is printed. Print the statement in the end, because in the end of your program, you have already excluded the newlines by decrementing the sum in the if statement of the second while loop.
The most probable cause is that you allocate 20 Mb of variables on the stack.
I would change the program so that it reads the file on line at a time (or even one character at a time).
That way you only need to allocate space for one line and not for the entire file.

trouble reading a text file

I am trying to read a txt file with following contents:
test.txt
3,4
5,6
7,8
each pair is in one line. I want to put these values in an array. But I want the array size to adjust based on number of pairs in the test txt.
So I calculated the number of lines available in the txt file until EOF and assigned the number of lines to the array to assign the sizeof the array.Then when I try to read the file using fscanf I get some weird numbers which is not even part of this txt file like 2342,123123.
Here is my code:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc , char **argv)
{
FILE *pf;
int k;
int counter=0;
int c;
pf = fopen("test.txt", "r");
if(pf==NULL)
{
printf("its nuull");
}
else
{
do
{
c=fgetc(pf);
if(c=='\n')
counter++;
}while(c!=EOF);
printf("counter value is = %d\n", counter);
int b[counter][2];
for(k=0;k<counter;k++)
{
fscanf(pf,"%d, %d" ,&b[k][0],&b[k][1]);
printf("%d,%d\n" ,b[k][0],b[k][1]);
}
}
fclose(pf);
}
I think you need to call:
rewind(pf);
after displaying your counter value.
This will reset the file pointer to the start of the file.
The issue is probably that the current file pointer is pointing at the end of the file. You need to read from the begining of the file now, so you need to do something like:
rewind(pf);
There are other mechanisms - for instance fseek or fsetpos, but rewind is what I would use here.
You might also check the return from fscanf - this will return the number of input items assigned. If this isn't 2 (in your case) then something went wrong.

Simple count how many integers are in file in C

Im currently learning C through random maths questions and have hit a wall. Im trying to read in 1000 digits to an array. But without specifiying the size of an array first i cant do that.
My Answer was to count how many integers there are in the file then set that as the size of the array.
However my program returns 4200396 instead of 1000 like i hoped.
Not sure whats going on.
my code: EDIT
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main (void)
{
FILE* fp;
const char filename[] = "test.txt";
char ch;
int count = 0;
fp = fopen(filename, "r");
if( fp == NULL )
{
printf( "Cannot open file: %s\n", filename);
exit(8);
}
do
{
ch = fgetc (fp);
count++;
}while (ch != EOF);
fclose(fp);
printf("Text file contains: %d\n", count);
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
test.txt file:
731671765313306249192251196744265747423553491949349698352031277450632623957831801698480186947885184385861560789112949495459501737958331952853208805511
125406987471585238630507156932909632952274430435576689664895044524452316173185640309871112172238311362229893423380308135336276614282806444486645238749
303589072962904915604407723907138105158593079608667017242712188399879790879227492190169972088809377665727333001053367881220235421809751254540594752243
525849077116705560136048395864467063244157221553975369781797784617406495514929086256932197846862248283972241375657056057490261407972968652414535100474
821663704844031998900088952434506585412275886668811642717147992444292823086346567481391912316282458617866458359124566529476545682848912883142607690042
242190226710556263211111093705442175069416589604080719840385096245544436298123098787992724428490918884580156166097919133875499200524063689912560717606
0588611646710940507754100225698315520005593572972571636269561882670428252483600823257530420752963450
Any help would be great.
You forgot to initialize count, so it contains random garbage.
int count = 0;
(But note that with this change it's still not going to work, since %d in a scanf format means read as many digits as you find rather than read a single digit.)
Turn on your compiler's warnings (-Wall), it will tell you that you didn't initialize count, which is a problem: it could contain absolutely anything when your program starts.
So initialize it:
int count = 0;
The other problem is that the scanfs won't do what you want, at all. %d will match a series of digits (a number), not an individual digit. If you do want to do your counting like that, use %c to read individual characters.
Another approach typically used (as long as you know the file isn't being updated) is to use fseek/ftell to seek to the end of the file, get the position (wich will tell you its size), then seek back to the start.
The fastest approach though would be to use stat or fstat to get the file size information from the filesystem.
If you want number of digits thin you tave to do it char-by-char e.g:
while (isdigit(fgetc(file_decriptor))
count++;
Look up fgetc, getc and scanf in manpages, you don't seem to understand whats going on in your code.
The way C initializes values is not specified. Most of the time it's garbage. Your count variable it's not initialized, so it mostly have a huge value like 1243435, try int count = 0.

confused by C syntax

i'm new at c.. and still having trouble at the syntax, hope you can help me... cause i'm stuck at this code
#include<stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
#include<string.h>
int main(void){
FILE *stream = NULL;
stream = fopen("studentinfo.txt", "a+");
/*some of initialization were used for testing purposes only*/
char arr[5];
char arr2[5];
int i;
char name[3];
char course[5];
printf("enter details: ");
scanf("%s", arr2);
while(!feof(stream)){
fgets(arr, 100, stream);//i am confused if the line capture was stored at arr[0]
if(strcmp(arr, arr2)==0){//i want to compare
printf("success");//testing
}
printf("%s", arr);//i wonder does fgets just overwrites the new line to arr[0]
}
fclose(stream);
getch();
}
thanks guys...
You're opening studentinfo.txt for appending, but then reading from it (and you don't check the open succeeded
you've allocated 5 characters for arr, but read up to 100 characters into it with the fgets. This will overflow and cause memory corruption
you've allocated 5 characters for arr2, but read an arbitary number of characters into it - this will overflow and cause memory corruption
Fgets reads characters into memory starting at arr. arr[0] is the first character. &arr[0] is the same as arr
What's the getch() at the end for?
Also, "a+" positions the stream at the end of the file, so you won't be able to read anything.
if you have an existing file... and your file has data on it. then you could check if the data you typed is existing on the file or not. i'm not sure if this is what you want.
example if you typed... love
and the file also contains the exact word... love (on one line)
then it will print "success".
if the data you typed is not existing on the file, it will be appended on the file (on the next line).
int main(void){
char arr[5];
char arr2[5];
int i;
int n=0;
FILE *stream = NULL;
FILE *append = NULL;
stream = fopen("studentinfo.txt", "rt");
append = fopen("studentinfo.txt", "a+");
printf("enter details: ");
scanf("%s", arr2);
while(!feof(stream)){
fgets(arr, 6, stream);
if(strcmp(arr, arr2)==0){
printf("success");
} else n=-1;
}
if (n==-1){
fprintf(append, "%s\n", arr2);
}
fclose(stream);
fclose(append);
system("pause");
}
I am not sure why you are opening the stream with a+ because you never actually write to it. Maybe you want to make sure the file exists even if 0 length? You should still check that the open succeeded though.
You are then reading 100 characters into an array of just 5 bytes so you will get a serious memory overwrite if the file really does contain that number.
The scanf is unsafe too of course as the user may enter too many characters (they are actually limited to 4 because there is a NULL terminator that gets read).
At the end you appear to be writing the last line randomly if the user did not enter a matching line from the file.

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