Question

I’m trying to read in a file and then output the file by characters. I want the user to enter a number which will be the number of lines to be displayed.

Without the following line, my code will display the entire text file.
if (y == lineCount) break;

This line is supposed to break the loop when the number of newline characters counted is equal to the number the user entered.

I can count the number of newLine characters and display that but when I try to break the loop after reaching that certain number of newLines, the code breaks after 1 character

#include <stdio.h>

int main ( int argc, char *argv[] )
{
    FILE *file = fopen( argv[1], "r" );
    int lineCount, x, y;

    printf("enter a number of lines of lines to be displayed\n");
    scanf("&d", &y);


    while  ( ( x = fgetc( file )) != EOF )  //read characters
    {
        printf( "%c", x );       //print character

        if (x == '\n')           //check for newline character
            lineCount++;    

        if (y == lineCount)      //check for newLine character
            break;               //??? y = lineCount after 1 character???
    }

    printf( "%d lines in the text file\n", lineCount );  //testing the newline characters was being read

   fclose( file );
}

Answer 1

You want scanf(“%d”, &y) instead of scanf(“&d”, &y).