Separating a string in C

Question

so I need help separating one string into multiple separate ones. For example, let's say I have something like:

char sentence[]= "This is a sentence.";

and I want to split it to:

char A[]="This";
char B[]="is";
char C[]="a";
char D[]="sentence.";

You may need to use strdup too. (You can't strtok a constant) — enhzflep, Jun 25 '16 at 19:01
@JohnColeman Likely he wants to say that copying might be necessary for leaving the source string untouched ("may need"). +1 to both, :-) — Amin Negm-Awad, Jun 25 '16 at 19:06
@AminNegm-Awad Good point. People coming to C from other languages are likely to be tripped up by the destructive nature of `strtok` the first time they encounter it. — John Coleman, Jun 25 '16 at 23:45

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

1

Same question, different split requirement:

Split string with delimiters in C

edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

Community

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answered Jun 25 '16 at 19:03

Bowen Yang

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Amin Negm-Awad · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-26T08:10:04.037

As mentioned you can use strtok() to do this job. The usage is not very intuitive:

char sentence[]= "This is a sentence."; // sentence is changed during tokenization. If you want to keep the original data, copy it.

char *word = strtok( sentence, " ." ); // Only space + full stop for having a multi delimiter example
while (word!=NULL)
{
  // word points to the first part. The end of the word is marked with \0 in the original string
  // Do something with it, process it, store it
  … 
 word = strtok( NULL, " ."); // To get the next word out of sentence, pass NULL
}

Separating a string in C

2 Answers2