Going through a text file line by line in C - c

Question

I have been working on a small exercise for my CIS class and am very confused by the methods C uses to read from a file. All that I really need to do is read through a file line by line and use the information gathered from each line to do a few manipulations. I tried using the getline method and others with no luck.
My code is currently as follows:
int main(char *argc, char* argv[]){
const char *filename = argv[0];
FILE *file = fopen(filename, "r");
char *line = NULL;
while(!feof(file)){
sscanf(line, filename, "%s");
printf("%s\n", line);
}
return 1;
}
Right now I am getting a seg fault with the sscanf method and I am not sure why. I am a total C noob and just wondering if there was some big picture thing that I was missing.
Thanks

Answer 1

So many problems in so few lines. I probably forget some:
argv[0] is the program name, not the first argument;
if you want to read in a variable, you have to allocate its memory
one never loops on feof, one loops on an IO function until it fails, feof then serves to determinate the reason of failure,
sscanf is there to parse a line, if you want to parse a file, use fscanf,
"%s" will stop at the first space as a format for the ?scanf family
to read a line, the standard function is fgets,
returning 1 from main means failure
So
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
char const* const fileName = argv[1]; /* should check that argc > 1 */
FILE* file = fopen(fileName, "r"); /* should check the result */
char line[256];
while (fgets(line, sizeof(line), file)) {
/* note that fgets don't strip the terminating \n, checking its
presence would allow to handle lines longer that sizeof(line) */
printf("%s", line);
}
/* may check feof here to make a difference between eof and io failure -- network
timeout for instance */
fclose(file);
return 0;
}

Answer 2

To read a line from a file, you should use the fgets function: It reads a string from the specified file up to either a newline character or EOF.
The use of sscanf in your code would not work at all, as you use filename as your format string for reading from line into a constant string literal %s.
The reason for SEGV is that you write into the non-allocated memory pointed to by line.

Answer 3

In addition to the other answers, on a recent C library (Posix 2008 compliant), you could use getline. See this answer (to a related question).

Answer 4

Say you're dealing with some other delimiter, such as a \t tab, instead of a \n newline.
A more general approach to delimiters is the use of getc(), which grabs one character at a time.
Note that getc() returns an int, so that we can test for equality with EOF.
Secondly, we define an array line[BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH] of type char, in order to store up to BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH-1 characters on the stack (we have to save that last character for a \0 terminator character).
Use of an array avoids the need to use malloc and free to create a character pointer of the right length on the heap.
#define BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH 1024
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
FILE *file = NULL;
char line[BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH];
int tempChar;
unsigned int tempCharIdx = 0U;
if (argc == 2)
file = fopen(argv[1], "r");
else {
fprintf(stderr, "error: wrong number of arguments\n"
"usage: %s textfile\n", argv[0]);
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
if (!file) {
fprintf(stderr, "error: could not open textfile: %s\n", argv[1]);
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
/* get a character from the file pointer */
while(tempChar = fgetc(file))
{
/* avoid buffer overflow error */
if (tempCharIdx == BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH) {
fprintf(stderr, "error: line is too long. increase BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH.\n");
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
/* test character value */
if (tempChar == EOF) {
line[tempCharIdx] = '\0';
fprintf(stdout, "%s\n", line);
break;
}
else if (tempChar == '\n') {
line[tempCharIdx] = '\0';
tempCharIdx = 0U;
fprintf(stdout, "%s\n", line);
continue;
}
else
line[tempCharIdx++] = (char)tempChar;
}
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
If you must use a char *, then you can still use this code, but you strdup() the line[] array, once it is filled up with a line's worth of input. You must free this duplicated string once you're done with it, or you'll get a memory leak:
#define BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH 1024
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
FILE *file = NULL;
char line[BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH];
int tempChar;
unsigned int tempCharIdx = 0U;
char *dynamicLine = NULL;
if (argc == 2)
file = fopen(argv[1], "r");
else {
fprintf(stderr, "error: wrong number of arguments\n"
"usage: %s textfile\n", argv[0]);
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
if (!file) {
fprintf(stderr, "error: could not open textfile: %s\n", argv[1]);
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
while(tempChar = fgetc(file))
{
/* avoid buffer overflow error */
if (tempCharIdx == BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH) {
fprintf(stderr, "error: line is too long. increase BUFFER_MAX_LENGTH.\n");
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
/* test character value */
if (tempChar == EOF) {
line[tempCharIdx] = '\0';
dynamicLine = strdup(line);
fprintf(stdout, "%s\n", dynamicLine);
free(dynamicLine);
dynamicLine = NULL;
break;
}
else if (tempChar == '\n') {
line[tempCharIdx] = '\0';
tempCharIdx = 0U;
dynamicLine = strdup(line);
fprintf(stdout, "%s\n", dynamicLine);
free(dynamicLine);
dynamicLine = NULL;
continue;
}
else
line[tempCharIdx++] = (char)tempChar;
}
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}