For some context, my game runs in the terminal and is like a command line type game. At the moment to process commands is does a strcmp() for every single command which isn’t really pretty nor efficient. Because of this, I decided I should redo it. I tried looking at other posts and didn’t find anything useful. What I’m looking for is for it to save each section of the command.
For example:
//let's just say command = "debug test"
char part1;
char part2;
split via " "
part1 = "debug"
part2 = "test"
I tried to use sscanf() but it would just cut down the string. For example let’s say I gave it the string “test”.
It would output:
test -> est -> st //and so on
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Here’s a minimal solution using sscanf():
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#define PART_LEN 5
#define str(s) str2(s)
#define str2(s) #s
int main() {
char command[] = "debug test";
char part1[PART_LEN+1] = "";
char part2[PART_LEN+1] = "";
int r = sscanf(command, "%" str(PART_LEN) "s%" str(PART_LEN) "s", part1, part2);
if(r != 2) {
// handle partial input
}
printf("part=%s part2=%sn", part1, part2);
}
The key insights are:
- The two parts variables needs to be arrays
char []of appropriate size wheresscanf()can store copies of the strings. - Always use a maximum field width when reading strings with
scanf()-family of functions. - Handle incomplete input (
r != 2). In this case I initialized the two parts to the empty string.
and here is a similar solution with strtok():
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#define DELIM " "
int main() {
char command[] = "debug test";
char *part1 = strtok(command, DELIM);
char *part2 = strtok(NULL, DELIM);
printf("part=%s part2=%sn", part1 ? part1 : "", part2 ? part2 : "");
}
The key insights are:
- The variable
commandmust be of typechar []and notchar *asstrtok()modifies the string. - The first call to
strtok()expects a string as the first argument, and NULL on subsequent calls. part1and/orpart2may be NULL which which case no tokens were found.
A 3rd option would be to implement a split() function to return an array of strings found. See Split string with delimiters in C
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