Question

I’ve tried both a recursive and iterative method to this, but I keep running into the issue of storing a character string of an indeterminate length. If their is some sort of library or Api call that reads until the next white space that would prove extremely helpful.

But essentially, I need to create an Array of Structs that contain character arrays.

Answer 1

I guess this example shows what you were looking for. I’d recommend to play around with malloc and free to discover it’s behavior. Also read the comment at the goto, don’t use goto unless you really know you are doing. You can fail very easy very hard using it. A while loop with a if to check if the buffer overflows with the next character would be better, but I was lazy so I left it as is. If you have any questions anymore please ask.

#include <malloc.h>
#include <string.h>

int main( ) {
  unsigned bufferSize = 0; // our array size
  int i = 0; // current position in buffer
  // we allocate memory for our buffer
  char *buffer = (char *)malloc( bufferSize += 10 );

  int ch = EOF; // set to eof, we will use this to buffer input

  // read input until buffer is full
repeat_input:
  for( ; i < bufferSize; i++ ) { // a while loop would be better for this job...
    ch = fgetc( stdin );
    if( ch == ' ' ) {
      // if there is a space we can break here
      goto done; // this is bad coding practice, i am just a bit lazy now
    }
    buffer[ i ] = ch;
  }

  // keep our old buffer pointer to not create a memleak
  char *old_buffer = buffer;
  buffer = (char *)malloc( bufferSize += 10 );

  // copy content of old buffer to new one
  int k = 0;
  for( k = 0; k <= i; k++ ) {
    buffer[ k ] = old_buffer[ k ];
  }

  // free RAM, else we have a memleak
  free( old_buffer );
  goto repeat_input;

done:
  fputs( buffer, stderr );
  free( buffer );
  return 1;
}