Question

What is the simplest way (least error-prone, least lines of code, however you want to interpret it) to open a file in C and read its contents into a string (char*, char[], whatever)?

Answer 1

I tend to just load the entire buffer as a raw memory chunk into memory and do the parsing on my own. That way I have best control over what the standard lib does on multiple platforms.

This is a stub I use for this. you may also want to check the error-codes for fseek, ftell and fread. (omitted for clarity).

char * buffer = 0; long length; FILE * f = fopen (filename, 'rb');  if (f) {   fseek (f, 0, SEEK_END);   length = ftell (f);   fseek (f, 0, SEEK_SET);   buffer = malloc (length);   if (buffer)   {     fread (buffer, 1, length, f);   }   fclose (f); }  if (buffer) {   // start to process your data / extract strings here... }