strtok - Tokenize txt file with characters in c

Question

I have a txt file with delimiter ';'.
I'm reading this file in C using fgets and tokenizing the fields using strtok.

File record Example -
500;Y;Something error message

My C Structure where I want to load files

typedef errRec{
    long id;
    char fail_ind;
    char error_msg[1000];
}errrec_t;

I'm tokenizing file fields as below.

errRec.id = atol(strtok(fileRec,";"));
strcpy(errRec.fail_ind,strtok(NULL,";"));
strcpy(errRec.error_msg, strtok(NULL,";"));

Question : strcpy is working correctly for the id and error_msg but not working for the fail_ind which is of character type.
I'm getting warning as -

warning #167: argument of type "YESNOIND_C_T={char}" is incompatible with parameter of type 
"char*__restrict__";
strcpy(errRec.fail_ind,strtok(NULL,";"));

How can I store this character from strtok in fail_ind or What are the different ways I can store the character ?

After some suggestions I'm trying to use strsep instead of strtok to handle the NULL values -

char *fileRecPtr;
fileRecPtr = strdup(fileRec);

errRec.id = atol(strtok(&fileRecPtr,";"));
errRec.fail_ind = *(strsep(&fileRecPtr,";"));
strcpy(errRec.error_msg, strsep(&fileRecPtr,";"));

Do you think this approach is correct and especially below line is correct to store Character?

errRec.fail_ind = *(strsep(&fileRecPtr,";"));

You should not directly pass the return value of `strtok` to other functions as it may return a `NULL` pointer to indicate "no more tokens". `strsep` is less portable, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/7219504/10622916 `strsep` can also return `NULL` if called again after the last token. — Bodo, Jun 21 '21 at 10:51
`char fail_ind;` is large enough to hold a string of length zero. If you want to use string functions, that's probably not going to big enough if you want to actually store anything. — William Pursell, Jun 21 '21 at 12:43
If you want to store a string of length 1, use `char fail_ind[2];` and bound the copy by using `strncpy` — William Pursell, Jun 21 '21 at 12:45

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 21 '21 at 12:28

If you ignore the risk of program crashes, you could use:

errRec.fail_ind = *strtok(NULL, ";");

That's risky — if strtok() returns a null pointer, your program probably crashes (and that's true of the other uses of strtok()). A safer version saves and checks the pointer:

char *ptr = strtok(NULL, ";");
if (ptr == NULL)
    …report error; do not continue…
errRec.fail_ind = *ptr;

This does not validate that the failure indicator is a single character; it's your call on whether that matters.

strtok - Tokenize txt file with characters in c

1 Answers1