C using strtok to parse by quotes?

zero79 · 03-07-2005, 12:46 PM

i'm trying to use 'strtok' to process out a name that may contain spaces that is sandwiched between quotes. i can't seem to correctly parse out the name. here is my code thus far:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
  char line[] = "53      \"example name\"";
  char *num, *name;
  
  printf("%s\n", line);
  
  num = (char *)strtok(line, " ");
  name = (char *)strtok(NULL, "\"");
  
  printf("num = %s, name = %s\n", num, name);
}

the output when executing the code is

Code:

num = 53, name =

i want the output to be

Code:

num = 53, name = example name

what am i doing wrong, and how can a i retrieve the data i am looking for? thanks for any thoughts.

zero79 · 03-07-2005, 12:55 PM

ok, answering my own question. i should parse by the quote character first, then by spaces. this code does what i expect.

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
  char line[] = "53   \"example name\"";
  char *num, *name, *tmp;
  
  printf("%s\n", line);
  
  tmp = (char *)strtok(line, "\"");
  name = (char *)strtok(NULL, "\"");
  num = (char *)strtok(tmp, " ");
  
  printf("num = %s, name = %s\n", num, name);
}

peace.

itsme86 · 03-07-2005, 01:06 PM

I like it better with strchr()

Code:

itsme@dreams:~/C$ cat getname.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void)
{
  char line[] = "53      \"example name\"";
  char *num, *name;

  num = line;
  name = strchr(num, ' ');
  *name = '\0';
  name = strchr(name+1, '"')+1;
  *strchr(name+1, '"') = '\0';;

  printf("num = '%s', name = '%s'\n", num, name);
  return 0;
}

Code:

itsme@dreams:~/C$ ./getname
num = '53', name = 'example name'
itsme@dreams:~/C$

zero79 · 03-07-2005, 03:44 PM

yeah, nice bit of trickiness. fun stuff. peace.