Question

I have a text file with 25 lines, each with 34 characters on.

In C how is it possible to load these characters and store them into a 2D array?

If the first three lines of the file are such:

bamaaaaaaaacxxxxxxxxxxbaaaaaaaamac
jzjzzzzzzzzdaaaaaaaaaaezzzzzzzzjzj
jzjzbaaczgzzzzzzzzzzzzzzgzbaaczjzj

...and so on

I require the array to be stored as if it was defined like this:

char* data[] = {
            "baaaaaaaaaaaaaacxxbaaaaaaaaaaaaaac",
            "jzzzzzzzzzzzzzzjxxjzzzzzzzzzzzzzzj",
            "jzbaaaaaaaaaaaaexxdaaaaaaaaaaaaczj",
...and so on

Hopefully this makes some sense! It is important that the type of data is char data[][] as it is used in that format in the rest of my project and cannot be changed.

I have done the basic begining of the File IO

FILE  *infp;

printf("Opening file\n");

if((infp = fopen("file.txt", "r"))== NULL) {
    printf("\nERROR : Unable to open input file\n");
    SetExitWithCode( 999 );
    }else{
            //code here
            }

Can anyone help?

Answer 1

So, you want your array to look like this:

char data[25][35] //There is an extra 1 character per line to hold the null terminator character

Then simply read the whole file into that array

fread(data, 1, sizeof(data), infp);

And finally, replace the new line character in on each line with a terminator

for (int i = 0; i < 25; ++i) {
    data[i][34] = 0;
}

This is the easiest solution to the problem, but it is also a bad way of doing it. It does not validate that the data is in the correct format, and everything is hard coded.