Question

I have a string of characters that is something like ” asdf + lghd + ewre + fdsf + …” that is of varying length. From this I also have a template for use with the sscanf function that is similar to “%s + %s + %s + …”. Because both of these are of varying lengths, is it possible to replace those additional arguments in sscanf where the values are to be stored with a dynamic array of strings? For example:

char *test = "adfe + asdf + fghe + jklo";
char *template = "%s + %s + %s + %s";
char destination[4][4];
sscanf(test, template, destination);

From an immediate glance this appears to not work, so is there an alternative method to doing this?

Answer 1

sscanf() doesn’t support this, but you could write your own version of scanf.

I’ve done this already in C# and posted the code here. Perhaps my code will give you some ideas for writing a custom version in C.