How to split a string to 2 strings in C

I was wondering how you could take 1 string, split it into 2 with a delimiter, such as space, and assign the 2 parts to 2 separate strings. I've tried using strtok() but to no avail.

Solution 1:

#include <string.h>

char *token;
char line[] = "SEVERAL WORDS";
char *search = " ";


// Token will point to "SEVERAL".
token = strtok(line, search);


// Token will point to "WORDS".
token = strtok(NULL, search);

Update

Note that on some operating systems, strtok man page mentions:

This interface is obsoleted by strsep(3).

An example with strsep is shown below:

char* token;
char* string;
char* tofree;

string = strdup("abc,def,ghi");

if (string != NULL) {

  tofree = string;

  while ((token = strsep(&string, ",")) != NULL)
  {
    printf("%s\n", token);
  }

  free(tofree);
}

Solution 2:

For purposes such as this, I tend to use strtok_r() instead of strtok().

For example ...

int main (void) {
char str[128];
char *ptr;

strcpy (str, "123456 789asdf");
strtok_r (str, " ", &ptr);

printf ("'%s'  '%s'\n", str, ptr);
return 0;
}

This will output ...

'123456' '789asdf'

If more delimiters are needed, then loop.

Hope this helps.