Question

Im currently writing a c++ program that needs to extract string and numeric data from a text file. The format of the data is the following;

3225 C9+     ELECTR  C8      C        *      1.00E-6  -0.30       0.0

first entry is an integer, next 5 entries are strings and the last 3 are floats. No string is ever greater than 7 characters long.

I am reading the file line by line and then extracting the data using;

sscanf(ln.c_str(),"%d  %s  %s  %s  %s  %s  %e  %e  %e",
&rref[numre],&names[numre][0],&names[numre][1],&names[numre][2],&names[numre][3],
&names[numre][4],&nums[numre][0],&nums[numre][1],&nums[numre][2]);

this works fine untill I meet a line like;

  3098 SIC2H3+ ELECTR  SIC2H2  H        *      1.50E-7  -0.50       0.0

where one of the entrys is the full 7 characters long. In this case I get;

names[3097][0] = "SIC2H3+ELECTR"

and,

names[3097][1] = "ELECTR"

Anybody got any ideas…they will be much appreciated!!

Answer 1

The most likely problem is in the declaration of names: if you declared it as holding seven characters or less, and forgot to allocate space for terminating zero, you’d get the results that you are describing.

char names[MAX][4][7]

will have enough space for strings of length 6 or less; for strings of length 7, you need

char names[MAX][4][8]