sscanf until it reaches a comma

Question

I'm trying to scanf words and numbers from a string looks like: "hello, world, I, 287876, 6.0" <-- this string is stored in a char array (string) What I need to do is to split things up and assign them to different variables so it would be like

     char a = "hello"
     char b = "world"
     char c = "I"
     unsigned long d = 287876
     float e = 6.0

I know that regular scanf stops reading from stdin when it reaches a white space. So I've been thinking that there might be a way to make sscanf stop reading when it reaches a "," (comma)

I've been exploring the library to find a format for sscanf to read only alphabet and numbers. I couldn't find such a thing, maybe I should look once more.

Any help? Thanks in advance :)

Solution 1

If the order of your variables in the string is fixe, I mean It's always:

string, string, string, int, float

the use the following format specifier in sscanf():

int len = strlen(str);
char a[len];
char b[len];
char c[len];
unsigned long d;
float e;

sscanf(" %[^,] , %[^,] , %[^,] , %lu , %lf", a, b, c, &d, &e);

Solution 2

This example using strtok should be helpful:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main ()
{
  char str[] ="hello, world, I, 287876, 6.0" ;
  char * pch;
  printf ("Splitting string \"%s\" into tokens:\n",str);
  pch = strtok (str,",");
  while (pch != NULL)
  {
    printf ("%s\n",pch);
    pch = strtok (NULL, ",");
  }
  return 0;
}

Comments

[K Scott Piel]

I'm not sure if it is or it isn't -- hence the "AND/OR" in my response. IF the strtok_r flavor is supported, it is thread safe and recursion safe, not a global state function as is strtok -- either way... one variant of strtok or another is a solution to the problem.

[K Scott Piel]

For the record... strtok_r is POSIX.1-2001

[Faisal Al-shawi]

Yes, that's what I'm doing. Thanks

[user2284570]

@MOHAMED : How I can do it for scanning until it match a particular substring?

[chqrlie]

For safety, the arrays should be defined with a length of len + 1, since e is a float, the last format should be %f and some of the spaces in the format string are redundant: " %[^,], %[^,], %[^,],%lu,%f"