Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to read from a text file line by line using standard I/O functions.
C Read Text File Steps
In order to read from a text file, you follow the steps below:
- First, open the text file using the fopen() function.
- Second, use the function fgets() to read text from the stream and store it as a string. The newline or EOF character makes the fgets() function stop reading so you can check the newline or EOF file character to read the whole line.
- Third, close the text file using the fclose() function.
C Read Text File Example
Below is the source code of reading a text file line by line and output it to the screen.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 | /* * File: main.c * Author: zentut.com * Description: Read text file line by line and output it to * the screen. */ #include <stdio.h> #define MAXCHAR 1000 int main() { FILE *fp; char str[MAXCHAR]; char* filename = "c:\\temp\\test.txt"; fp = fopen(filename, "r"); if (fp == NULL){ printf("Could not open file %s",filename); return 1; } while (fgets(str, MAXCHAR, fp) != NULL) printf("%s", str); fclose(fp); return 0; } |
In this tutorial, you’ve learned how to read from a text file using C standard I/O function.