Question

I am reading the contents of the file using fread into an char array. But I am not sure why it is not getting printed in the output. Here is the code:

void getInfo(FILE* inputFile)
{
   char chunk[4];
   int liIndex;
   for (liIndex = 0 ; liIndex < 4 ; liIndex++)
   {
      fread(chunk, sizeof(char), 4, inputFile);
   }
   printf("\n chunk %s", chunk);
}

Output prints nothing at all. Where am I going wrong?

Regards ,
darkie

Answer 1

You cannot print a binary file using printf. printf will treat the binary blob as a null-terminated string, so any '\0' byte that happens to be in your chunk will end the “string”.

To write the chunk to stdout in full, use fwrite:

fwrite(chunk, sizeof(char), 4, stdout);