In C, how should I read a text file and print all strings

I have a text file named test.txt

I want to write a C program that can read this file and print the content to the console (assume the file contains only ASCII text).

I don't know how to get the size of my string variable. Like this:

char str[999];
FILE * file;
file = fopen( "test.txt" , "r");
if (file) {
    while (fscanf(file, "%s", str)!=EOF)
        printf("%s",str);
    fclose(file);
}

The size 999 doesn't work because the string returned by fscanf can be larger than that. How can I solve this?

Solution 1:

The simplest way is to read a character, and print it right after reading:

int c;
FILE *file;
file = fopen("test.txt", "r");
if (file) {
    while ((c = getc(file)) != EOF)
        putchar(c);
    fclose(file);
}

c is int above, since EOF is a negative number, and a plain char may be unsigned.

If you want to read the file in chunks, but without dynamic memory allocation, you can do:

#define CHUNK 1024 /* read 1024 bytes at a time */
char buf[CHUNK];
FILE *file;
size_t nread;

file = fopen("test.txt", "r");
if (file) {
    while ((nread = fread(buf, 1, sizeof buf, file)) > 0)
        fwrite(buf, 1, nread, stdout);
    if (ferror(file)) {
        /* deal with error */
    }
    fclose(file);
}

The second method above is essentially how you will read a file with a dynamically allocated array:

char *buf = malloc(chunk);

if (buf == NULL) {
    /* deal with malloc() failure */
}

/* otherwise do this.  Note 'chunk' instead of 'sizeof buf' */
while ((nread = fread(buf, 1, chunk, file)) > 0) {
    /* as above */
}

Your method of fscanf() with %s as format loses information about whitespace in the file, so it is not exactly copying a file to stdout.

Solution 2:

There are plenty of good answers here about reading it in chunks, I'm just gonna show you a little trick that reads all the content at once to a buffer and prints it.

I'm not saying it's better. It's not, and as Ricardo sometimes it can be bad, but I find it's a nice solution for the simple cases.

I sprinkled it with comments because there's a lot going on.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

char* ReadFile(char *filename)
{
   char *buffer = NULL;
   int string_size, read_size;
   FILE *handler = fopen(filename, "r");

   if (handler)
   {
       // Seek the last byte of the file
       fseek(handler, 0, SEEK_END);
       // Offset from the first to the last byte, or in other words, filesize
       string_size = ftell(handler);
       // go back to the start of the file
       rewind(handler);

       // Allocate a string that can hold it all
       buffer = (char*) malloc(sizeof(char) * (string_size + 1) );

       // Read it all in one operation
       read_size = fread(buffer, sizeof(char), string_size, handler);

       // fread doesn't set it so put a \0 in the last position
       // and buffer is now officially a string
       buffer[string_size] = '\0';

       if (string_size != read_size)
       {
           // Something went wrong, throw away the memory and set
           // the buffer to NULL
           free(buffer);
           buffer = NULL;
       }

       // Always remember to close the file.
       fclose(handler);
    }

    return buffer;
}

int main()
{
    char *string = ReadFile("yourfile.txt");
    if (string)
    {
        puts(string);
        free(string);
    }

    return 0;
}

Let me know if it's useful or you could learn something from it :)