Representing EOF in C code?

Question

The newline character is represented by "\n" in C code. Is there an equivalent for the end-of-file (EOF) character?

Answer 1

EOF is not a character (in most modern operating systems). It is simply a condition that applies to a file stream when the end of the stream is reached. The confusion arises because a user may signal EOF for console input by typing a special character (e.g Control-D in Unix, Linux, et al), but this character is not seen by the running program, it is caught by the operating system which in turn signals EOF to the process.

Note: in some very old operating systems EOF was a character, e.g. Control-Z in CP/M, but this was a crude hack to avoid the overhead of maintaining actual file lengths in file system directories.

Answer 2

EOF is not a character. It can't be: A (binary) file can contain any character. Assume you have a file with ever-increasing bytes, going 0 1 2 3 ... 255 and once again 0 1 ... 255, for a total of 512 bytes. Whichever one of those 256 possible bytes you deem EOF, the file will be cut short.

That's why getchar() et al. return an int. The range of possible return values are those that a char can have, plus a genuine int value EOF (defined in stdio.h). That's also why converting the return value to a char before checking for EOF will not work.

Note that some protocols have "EOF" "characters." ASCII has "End of Text", "End of Transmission", "End of Transmission Block" and "End of Medium". Other answers have mentioned old OS'es. I myself input ^D on Linux and ^Z on Windows consoles to stop giving programs input. (But files read via pipes can have ^D and ^Z characters anywhere and only signal EOF when they run out of bytes.) C strings are terminated with the '\0' character, but that also means they cannot contain the character '\0'. That's why all C non-string data functions work using a char array (to contain the data) and a size_t (to know where the data ends).

Edit: The C99 standard §7.19.1.3 states:

The macros are [...]
EOF
which expands to an integer constant expression, with type int and a negative value, that is returned by several functions to indicate end-of-file, that is, no more input from a stream;

Answer 3

No. EOF is not a character, but a state of the filehandle.

While there are there are control characters in the ASCII charset that represents the end of the data, these are not used to signal the end of files in general. For example EOT (^D) which in some cases almost signals the same.

When the standard C library uses signed integer to return characters and uses -1 for end of file, this is actually just the signal to indicate than an error happened. I don't have the C standard available, but to quote SUSv3:

If the end-of-file indicator for the stream is set, or if the stream is at end-of-file, the end-of-file indicator for the stream shall be set and fgetc() shall return EOF. If a read error occurs, the error indicator for the stream shall be set, fgetc() shall return EOF, and shall set errno to indicate the error.

Answer 4

I've read all the comments. It's interesting to notice what happens when you print out this:

printf("\nInteger =    %d\n", EOF);             //OUTPUT = -1
printf("Decimal =    %d\n", EOF);               //OUTPUT = -1
printf("Octal =  %o\n", EOF);                   //OUTPUT = 37777777777
printf("Hexadecimal =  %x\n", EOF);             //OUTPUT = ffffffff
printf("Double and float =  %f\n", EOF);        //OUTPUT = 0.000000
printf("Long double =  %Lf\n", EOF);            //OUTPUT = 0.000000
printf("Character =  %c\n", EOF);               //OUTPUT = nothing

As we can see here, EOF is NOT a character (whatsoever).

Answer 5

The EOF character recognized by the command interpreter on Windows (and MSDOS, and CP/M) is 0x1a (decimal 26, aka Ctrl+Z aka SUB)

It can still be be used today for example to mark the end of a human-readable header in a binary file: if the file begins with "Some description\x1a" the user can dump the file content to the console using the TYPE command and the dump will stop at the EOF character, i.e. print Some description and stop, instead of continuing with the garbage that follows.

Answer 6

This is system dependent but often -1. See here

Answer 7

I think it may vary from system to system but one way of checking would be to just use printf

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
    printf("%d", EOF);
    return 0;
}

I did this on Windows and -1 was printed to the console. Hope this helps.

Answer 8

The value of EOF can't be confused with any real character.

If a= getchar(), then we must declare a big enough to hold any value that getchar() returns. We can't use char since a must be big enough to hold EOF in addition to characters.

Answer 9

The answer is NO, but...

You may confused because of the behavior of fgets()

From http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/fgets/ :

Reads characters from stream and stores them as a C string into str until (num-1) characters have been read or either a newline or the end-of-file is reached, whichever happens first.

Answer 10

I have been researching a lot about the EOF signal. In the book on Programming in C by Dennis Ritchie it is first encountered while introducing putchar() and getchar() commands. It basically marks the end of the character string input.

For eg. Let us write a program that seeks two numerical inputs and prints their sum. You'll notice after each numerical input you press Enter to mark the signal that you have completed the iput action. But while working with character strings Enter is read as just another character ['\n': newline character]. To mark the termination of input you enter ^Z(Ctrl + Z on keyboard) in a completely new line and then enter. That signals the next lines of command to get executed.

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
char c;
int i = 0;
printf("INPUT:\t");
c = getchar();

while (c != EOF)
{
   ++i;
   c = getchar();
   
};

printf("NUMBER OF CHARACTERS %d.", i);

return 0;}

The above is the code to count number of characters including '\n'(newline) and '\t'( space) characters. If you don't wanna count the newline characters do this :

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
char c;
int i = 0;
printf("INPUT:\t");
c = getchar();

while (c != EOF)
{
    if (c != '\n')
    {
        ++i;
    }

    c = getchar();
    };

printf("NUMBER OF CHARACTERS %d.", i);

return 0;}. 

NOW THE MAIN THINK HOOW TO GIVE INPUT. IT'S SIMPLE: Write all the story you want then go in a new line and enter ^Z and then enter again.

Answer 11

There is the constant EOF of type int, found in stdio.h. There is no equivalent character literal specified by any standard.