Question

What would be an efficient way of converting a delimited string into an array of strings in C (not C++)? For example, I might have:

char *input = "valgrind --leak-check=yes --track-origins=yes ./a.out"

The source string will always have only a single space as the delimiter. And I would like a malloc’ed array of malloc’ed strings char *myarray[] such that:

myarray[0]=="valgrind"
myarray[1]=="--leak-check=yes"
...

Edit I have to assume that there are an arbitrary number of tokens in the inputString so I can’t just limit it to 10 or something.

I’ve attempted a messy solution with strtok and a linked list I’ve implemented, but valgrind complained so much that I gave up.

(If you’re wondering, this is for a basic Unix shell I’m trying to write.)

Answer 1

What’s about something like:

char* string = "valgrind --leak-check=yes --track-origins=yes ./a.out";
char** args = (char**)malloc(MAX_ARGS*sizeof(char*));
memset(args, 0, sizeof(char*)*MAX_ARGS);

char* curToken = strtok(string, " \t");

for (int i = 0; curToken != NULL; ++i)
{
  args[i] = strdup(curToken);
  curToken = strtok(NULL, " \t");
}