Question

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C equivalent to fstream's peek

Say I have a file with characters in it. I want to look at what the next character is without moving the pointer, just to “peak” at it. how would I go about doing that?

FILE *fp;
char c, d;

fp = fopen (file, "r");

c = getc(fp);

d = nextchar?

How do I look at the character that comes next without actually calling getc again and moving the pointer?

Answer 1

You can simply use getc() to get the next character, followed by a call to ungetc().

Update: see @Jonathan’s comment for a wrapper that allows for peeking past the end of the file (returning EOF in that event).

Update 2: A slightly more compact version:

int fpeek(FILE * const fp)
{
  const int c = getc(fp);
  return c == EOF ? EOF : ungetc(c, fp);
}