How to read the content of a file to a string in C?

What is the simplest way (least error-prone, least lines of code, however you want to interpret it) to open a file in C and read its contents into a string (char*, char[], whatever)?

I tend to just load the entire buffer as a raw memory chunk into memory and do the parsing on my own. That way I have best control over what the standard lib does on multiple platforms.

This is a stub I use for this. you may also want to check the error-codes for fseek, ftell and fread. (omitted for clarity).

char * buffer = 0;
long length;
FILE * f = fopen (filename, "rb");

if (f)
{
  fseek (f, 0, SEEK_END);
  length = ftell (f);
  fseek (f, 0, SEEK_SET);
  buffer = malloc (length);
  if (buffer)
  {
    fread (buffer, 1, length, f);
  }
  fclose (f);
}

if (buffer)
{
  // start to process your data / extract strings here...
}

Another, unfortunately highly OS-dependent, solution is memory mapping the file. The benefits generally include performance of the read, and reduced memory use as the applications view and operating systems file cache can actually share the physical memory.

POSIX code would look like this:

int fd = open("filename", O_RDONLY);
int len = lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_END);
void *data = mmap(0, len, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, fd, 0);

Windows on the other hand is little more tricky, and unfortunately I don't have a compiler in front of me to test, but the functionality is provided by CreateFileMapping() and MapViewOfFile().

How to read the content of a file to a string in C?

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