C: Parse empty tokens from a string with strtok

Question

My application produces strings like the one below. I need to parse values between the separator into individual values.

2342|2sd45|dswer|2342||5523|||3654|         


        

Answer 1

Inspired by Patrick Schlüter answer I made this function, it is supposed to be thread safe and support empty tokens and doesn't change the original string

char* strTok(char** newString, char* delimiter)
{
    char* string = *newString;
    char* delimiterFound = (char*) 0;
    int tokLenght = 0;
    char* tok = (char*) 0;

    if(!string) return (char*) 0;

    delimiterFound = strstr(string, delimiter);

    if(delimiterFound){
        tokLenght = delimiterFound-string;
    }else{
        tokLenght = strlen(string);
    }

    tok = malloc(tokLenght + 1);
    memcpy(tok, string, tokLenght);
    tok[tokLenght] = '\0';

    *newString = delimiterFound ? delimiterFound + strlen(delimiter) : (char*)0;

    return tok;
}

you can use it like

char* input = "1,2,3,,5,";
char** inputP = &input;
char* tok;
while( (tok=strTok(inputP, ",")) ){
    printf("%s\n", tok);
}

This suppose to output

1
2
3

5

I tested it for simple strings but didn't use it in production yet, and posted it on code review too, so you can see what do others think about it

Answer 2

char *mystrtok(char **m,char *s,char c)
{
  char *p=s?s:*m;
  if( !*p )
    return 0;
  *m=strchr(p,c);
  if( *m )
    *(*m)++=0;
  else
    *m=p+strlen(p);
  return p;
}

• reentrant
• threadsafe
• strictly ANSI conform
• needs an unused help-pointer from calling context

e.g.

char *p,*t,s[]="2342|2sd45|dswer|2342||5523|||3654|Pswt";
for(t=mystrtok(&p,s,'|');t;t=mystrtok(&p,0,'|'))
  puts(t);

e.g.

char *p,*t,s[]="2,3,4,2|2s,d4,5|dswer|23,42||5523|||3654|Pswt";
for(t=mystrtok(&p,s,'|');t;t=mystrtok(&p,0,'|'))
{
  char *p1,*t1;
  for(t1=mystrtok(&p1,t,',');t1;t1=mystrtok(&p1,0,','))
    puts(t1);
}

your work :) implement char *c as parameter 3

Answer 3

Look into using strsep instead: strsep reference

Answer 4

On a first call, the function expects a C string as argument for str, whose first character is used as the starting location to scan for tokens. In subsequent calls, the function expects a null pointer and uses the position right after the end of last token as the new starting location for scanning.

To determine the beginning and the end of a token, the function first scans from the starting location for the first character not contained in delimiters (which becomes the beginning of the token). And then scans starting from this beginning of the token for the first character contained in delimiters, which becomes the end of the token.

What this say is that it will skip any '|' characters at the beginning of a token. Making 5523 the 5th token, which you already knew. Just thought I would explain why (I had to look it up myself). This also says that you will not get any empty tokens.

Since your data is setup this way you have a couple of possible solutions:
1) find all occurrences of || and replace with | | (put a space in there)
2) do a strstr 5 times and find the beginning of the 5th element.

Answer 5

In that case I often prefer a p2 = strchr(p1, '|') loop with a memcpy(s, p1, p2-p1) inside. It's fast, does not destroy the input buffer (so it can be used with const char *) and is really portable (even on embedded).

It's also reentrant; strtok isn't. (BTW: reentrant has nothing to do with multi-threading. strtok breaks already with nested loops. One can use strtok_r but it's not as portable.)

Answer 6

That's a limitation of strtok. The designers had whitespace-separated tokens in mind. strtok doesn't do much anyway; just roll your own parser. The C FAQ has an example.