Avoid reading to new line

[Samohtvii]

If i have a text file say:
"dog cat mouse elephant"
and i want to read those into an char array the reader always just reads dog and then moves to a new line.
I don't know how many 'animals' will be in the text file so i can't just
read (7,*) animal(1), animal(2) etc, but i do know there isn't more than 50 so i can just allocate the char array.

Will i have to read them all in the check for spaces and seperate them then or is there some way to stay on the file line until an actual endline is found?

Thanks

 

[gummibaer]

The solution would be to use allocatable arrays.

character*20, allocatable, dimension (:) :: animal
integer nAnimal        ! counter
integer irslt

...
...

open (unit = 10, file = animal.txt)
nAnimal = 0

!  go through the file to count the number of entries
do
    read (10,*, iostat = irslt)
    if (irslt .ne. 0) exit
    nAnimal = nAnimal + 1
enddo

!  allocate array and read elements from file
allocate (animal (nAnimal))
rewind (10)
do irslt = 1, nAnimal
    read (10, *) animal (irslt)
enddo

If you want to avoid reading your file twice, you can use pointers and a linked list, but this is more complicated to handle but a good option if you have rather big files.

Norbert


The optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds - the pessimist fears this might be true.