Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!vsi1!wyse!mips!prls!philabs!phri!marob!daveh
From: daveh@marob.masa.com (Dave Hammond)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: In defense of scanf() (Re: Re^2: scanf(..))
Message-ID: <1989Jun17.121802.6327@marob.masa.com>
Date: 17 Jun 89 12:18:02 GMT
Reply-To: daveh@marob.masa.com (Dave Hammond)
Organization: ESCC  New York City
Lines: 18

In article <824@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> mpl@cbnewsl.ATT.COM (michael.p.lindner) writes:
>> > When filtering tabular data from files, ....
>>
>in the middle of a strtok of another string it trashes its state information
>on the first string (a little known feature), which can cause extremely
>elusive bugs.

Not only that, since it delimits the returned token by replacing the
terminating blank with a null, you are forced to work with a copy
of the input line, if for some reason the complete line must survive
the call to strtok().

I prefer using strpbrk(line, "\s\t\n") and either copying, or just
peeking at the token, whichever is required.

--
Dave Hammond
daveh@marob.masa.com