C Hates Me... and I hate it back!

[coolbeanbob]

I've spent hours, an embarrasing number of HOURS on how to read a text file into a program. The requirements have shifted, but still. I hate you C. You and all your pointers.

The text file is a matrix, but with the first line being the number of rows. See example below.

matrix_c_is_evil.txt

11                // int number of rows
a1 a2 a3 b1       // double (these can be negative)
...
a33 a34 a35 b11

I have read a lot of stuff. And I guess I'm tired, because it all seems to cirlce back to the same stuff that doesn't work. Does fscanf not work with negatives? I'm having a hard time confirming this.

Do I have to read in the entire file, then parse by fgets or fgetc (or whatever the individual char function is)?

Why is this such a pain in the donkey? If it were integers it seems like it would be a lot easier.

[ddanbe]

I assume your values are separated by commas?
Did you ever try to google "How to read CSV file in C"?

[coolbeanbob]

They are space delimited.

[deceptikon]

If you show us your code, we can offer advice on improving it. For now, I can only answer your questions.

Does fscanf not work with negatives?

It works fine, provided you use a signed format specifier like "%d".

Do I have to read in the entire file, then parse by fgets or fgetc (or whatever the individual char function is)?

Probably. I say this because each line represents a row of the matrix, and fscanf will not tell you when it reaches a new line. All whitespace is equal where fscanf is concerned.

Why is this such a pain in the donkey? If it were integers it seems like it would be a lot easier.

My guess is it's a pain because you're trying to match a series of lines in the file to rows in an array. I strongly doubt this would be alleviated by storing integers in the file rather than floating-point. It's really a parsing problem, not a data representation problem.