CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cfileio
zZShort_CircuitZz
zZShort_CircuitZz

Reputation: 185

Unwanted characters when looping through text file

I have a text file containing only letters that looks like so:

AAAA
BBBB
CCCC

I am attempting to go through the file and save all of the characters in a string. Here is my code:

// Set sequence variable to sequence in file
for ( seqlength = 0; (symbol = getc(f)) != EOF;){   //seqlength is an int
                                                    //symbol is a char
                                                    //f is a file pointer 
   if ( symbol != '\n'){
      sequence[seqlength] = symbol;                 //sequence is a char[]
      seqlength++;
   }
}

When I print out printf("sequence: %s length: %d\n", sequence, strlen(sequence)); after this loop completes, I get the AAAABBBBCCCC string as expected, but with a bunch of garbage characters after the last C and a strlen of 22 when 12 is expected.

Can anyone provide a simple fix to this to make it work?

Thanks

Edit: I would like to also add that the non alphanumeric character appears to change every time when I run the code and print it to the console. Using the GCC compiler in Code::Blocks.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 185

Answers (1)

R Sahu
R Sahu

Reputation: 206577

The garbage you see is the result of failing to terminate the string with the null character.

for ( seqlength = 0; (symbol = getc(f)) != EOF;){   //seqlength is an int
                                                    //symbol is a char
                                                    //f is a file pointer 
   if ( symbol != '\n'){
      sequence[seqlength] = symbol;                 //sequence is a char[]
      seqlength++;
   }
}

// Terminate string with the null character.
sequence[seqlength] = '\0';

Upvotes: 1

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