Question

line is fgets’d, and running in a while loop with counter n, d is a struct with 2 char arrays, p and q. Basically, in a few words, I want to read a line, separate it into 2 strings, one up until the first space, and the other with the rest of the line. I clean up afterwards (\n from the file becomes \’0′). The code works, but is there a more idiomatic way to do this? What errors am I running into “unknowingly”?

    size_t spc = strcspn(line," ");
    strncpy(d[n].p, line, spc);
    d[n].p[spc+1]='\0';
    size_t l = strlen(line)-spc;
    strncpy(d[n].q, line+spc+1, l);
    char* nl = strchr(d[n].q, '\n');
    if(nl){
      *nl='\0';
    }
    n++;

EDIT: q may contain spaces.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I would write very nearly the code you have. Some tweaks:

• You’re not getting anything out of strncpy here, use memcpy.
• You’re not getting anything out of strcspn either, use strchr.
• Avoid scanning parts of the string twice.

So:

char *spc = strchr(line, ' ');
memcpy(d[n].p, line, spc - line);
d[n].p[spc - line] = '\0';

spc++;
char *end = strchr(spc, '\n');
if (end)
{
    memcpy(d[n].q, spc, end - spc);
    d[n].q[end - spc] = '\0';
} 
else 
    strcpy(d[n].q, spc);

n++;