NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c-part1/5939

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 2.0 KB

Path: bubba.NMSU.Edu!usenet
From: [e-mail] (Gary Hennigan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Ability to locate spaces?
Date: 21 Feb 1996 10:25:51 -0700
Organization: New Mexico State University - Electromagnetics Group
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In an article [e-mail] (Derek Harmon) wrote:
|>string = fgets (buf, 199, input);
| ^ BANG!  Unless you snuck a string = (char *)malloc( ... somewhere before
| this point, string remains an uninitialized pointer.  It's worth noting that
| fgets() returns the same string that it reads into buf.  There is no reason
| to keep its return value here, and you could discard it with,
|: fgets(buf, 200, input);  /* You don't use buf as a string, so you are */
|:                          /* technically allowed all 200 bytes if you */
|:                          /* don't intend to (otherwise buf[199] = '\0' */
|:                          /* is a good idea). */

Actually, you'll want to check your man page/manual on fgets()
behavior. At least on all the Unix implementations I've seen,
fgets(buf, 200, input) would read 199 characters (or to a newline
character) and then terminate the string with a NULL character
automatically. Thus, there is no need to manually terminate anything
read by fgets() or use one less than the size of the character array
into which the string would be read in the fgets() argument.

Also, you don't need to allocate "string" above. fgets() returns a
pointer to where the string resides. In this case string would've been
assigned as:
        string = &buf[0];

by fgets(), assuming, of course, the read was successful.

In other words...READ the man page/manual!!

Gary
([e-mail])