Question

gcc 4.4.4 c89

I am reading in from a text file and the text file consists of names in double quotes.

"Simpson, Homer"
etc

However, I want to remove the double quotes from the string.

This is how I have done it, but I am not sure its the best way.

int get_string(FILE *in, char *temp)
{
    char *quote = NULL;
    /* Get the first line */
    fgets(temp, STRING_SIZE, in);
    printf("temp before [ %s ]\n", temp);
    /* Find the second quote */
    if((quote = strrchr(temp, '"')) == NULL) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Text file incorrectly formatted\n");
        return FALSE;
    }
    /* Replace with a nul to get rid of the second quote */
    *quote = '\0';

    /* Move the pointer to point pass the first quote */
    temp++;
    printf("temp after [ %s ]\n", temp);
    return TRUE;
}

Many thanks for any suggestions,

Answer 1

No, this won’t work. You are changing the parameter temp, but the calling function will still have an old value. The temp outside the function will point to the opening quote. You ought to move the characters in your buffer.

However I would suggest allocating the buffer in heap and returning a pointer to it, letting the caller free the buffer when needed. This seems to be a cleaner solution. Again, this way you won’t rely on the caller to pass a sufficiently large buffer.

In general, a robust reading lines from a text file is not a trivial task in C, with its lack of automatic memory allocating functions. If possible to switch to C++, I would suggest trying much simpler C++ getline.