Reading a file character by character in C
There are a number of things wrong with your code:
char *readFile(char *fileName)
{
FILE *file;
char *code = malloc(1000 * sizeof(char));
file = fopen(fileName, "r");
do
{
*code++ = (char)fgetc(file);
} while(*code != EOF);
return code;
}
- What if the file is greater than 1,000 bytes?
- You are increasing
code
each time you read a character, and you returncode
back to the caller (even though it is no longer pointing at the first byte of the memory block as it was returned bymalloc
). - You are casting the result of
fgetc(file)
tochar
. You need to check forEOF
before casting the result tochar
.
It is important to maintain the original pointer returned by malloc
so that you can free it later. If we disregard the file size, we can achieve this still with the following:
char *readFile(char *fileName)
{
FILE *file = fopen(fileName, "r");
char *code;
size_t n = 0;
int c;
if (file == NULL)
return NULL; //could not open file
code = malloc(1000);
while ((c = fgetc(file)) != EOF)
{
code[n++] = (char) c;
}
// don't forget to terminate with the null character
code[n] = '\0';
return code;
}
There are various system calls that will give you the size of a file; a common one is stat
.
Expanding upon the above code from @dreamlax
char *readFile(char *fileName) {
FILE *file = fopen(fileName, "r");
char *code;
size_t n = 0;
int c;
if (file == NULL) return NULL; //could not open file
fseek(file, 0, SEEK_END);
long f_size = ftell(file);
fseek(file, 0, SEEK_SET);
code = malloc(f_size);
while ((c = fgetc(file)) != EOF) {
code[n++] = (char)c;
}
code[n] = '\0';
return code;
}
This gives you the length of the file, then proceeds to read it character by character.