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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T04:11:19+00:00

The question is quite simple, and I hope the answer it’s simple too :)

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The question is quite simple, and I hope the answer it’s simple too 🙂

Let’s say you are given a pattern, and you have to read a text file, and every line is composed by a first digit, that indicates the number of “patterns” in the string, and the the patterns element separed by one space.

For example, given the pattern 

key value

a valid line of the text file could be

3 10 "apple" 15 "orange" 17 "melon"

If the number N of repetitions is fixed, I’d use something like

fscanf(inFile,"%d %s",&n,str);

but is there a function that allows me to give the number of repetitions as a parameter, or I should scan each line and extract values I’m interested in, using substr and atoi?

The “trivial” way is obvious, I’m looking for something more “professional” and effective.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use fscanf() in a loop: first extract the number of repetitions N, then loop N times extracting your pattern.

    If you’re looking for something more professional or sophisticated, you might want to move away from the standard C library and towards a regex or parsing library, or something mentioned heere: http://www.and.org/vstr/comparison. While I won’t go so far as to say you can’t do string processing easily or well in C, it’s not a strong point of the core language.

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