help with string parsing which contain spaces.....

[huskers]

I have string which I need to parse and load it into database. The string contains 7 columns and is pipe delimited and some columns might be empty spaces. For empty space I need to load them into database as null values but the problem is I can not read the nulls in C.

The string to be parsed is as follows:
1234|4324||xyz|234||asdf

Can anyone tell how I can parse this information. I tried using sscanf() and strtok() but they ignore the null values.

I do not want to traverse through the whole string as there are millions of records and it might slow things down. Is there any efficent way of doing this.


Thanks

 

[DaveSinkula]

[tt]sscanf[/tt] seems to do okay for me.

#include<stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
   size_t i;
   char field [ 7 ] [ 20 ];
   const char text[] = "1234|4324||xyz|234||asdf", *ptr = text;
   int n = 0;
   for ( i = 0; i < sizeof field / sizeof *field; ++i )
   {
      if ( sscanf(ptr, "%19[^|]%n%*c", field[i], &n) == 1 )
      {
         ptr += n + 1;
      }
      else
      {
         field[i][0] = '\0';
         ++ptr;
      }
   }
   for ( i = 0; i < sizeof field / sizeof *field; ++i )
   {
      printf("field[%lu] = \"%s\"\n", (long unsigned)i, field[i]);
   }
   return 0;
}

/* my output
field[0] = "1234"
field[1] = "4324"
field[2] = ""
field[3] = "xyz"
field[4] = "234"
field[5] = ""
field[6] = "asdf"
*/