How Should I read a File line-by-line in C? - macos

Question

I'd like to read a file line-by-line. I have fgets() working okay, but am not sure what to do if a line is longer than the buffer sizes I've passed to fgets()? And furthermore, since fgets() doesn't seem to be Unicode-aware, and I want to allow UTF-8 files, it might miss line endings and read the whole file, no?
Then I thought I'd use getline(). However, I'm on Mac OS X, and while getline() is specified in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.8.sdk/usr/include/stdio.h, it's not in /usr/include/stdio, so gcc doesn't find it in the shell. And it's not particularly portable, obviously, and I'd like the library I'm developing to be generally useful.
So what's the best way to read a file line-by-line in C?

Answer 1

First of all, it's very unlikely that you need to worry about non-standard line terminators like U+2028. Normal text files are not expected to contain them, and the very overwhelming majority of all existing software that reads normal text files doesn't support them. You mention getline() which is available in glibc but not in MacOS's libc, and it would surprise me if getline() did support such fancy line terminators. It's almost a certainly that you can get away with just supporting LF (U+000A) and maybe also CR+LF (U+000D U+000A). To do that, you don't need to care about UTF-8. That's the beauty of UTF-8's ASCII compatibility and is by design.
As for supporting lines that are longer than the buffer you pass to fgets(), you can do this with a little extra logic around fgets. In pseudocode:
while true {
fgets(buffer, size, stream);
dynamically_allocated_string = strdup(buffer);
while the last char (before the terminating NUL) in the buffer is not '\n' {
concatenate the contents of buffer to the dynamically allocated string
/* the current line is not finished. read more of it */
fgets(buffer, size, stream);
}
process the whole line, as found in the dynamically allocated string
}
But again, I think you will find that there's really quite a lot of software out there that simply doesn't bother with that, from software that parses system config files like /etc/passwd to (some) scripting languages. Depending on your use case, it may very well be good enough to use a "big enough" buffer (e.g. 4096 bytes) and declare that you don't support lines longer than that. You can even call it a security feature (a line length limit is protection against resource exhaustion attacks from a crafted input file).

Answer 2

Based on this answer, here's what I've come up with:
#define LINE_BUF_SIZE 1024
char * getline_from(FILE *fp) {
char * line = malloc(LINE_BUF_SIZE), * linep = line;
size_t lenmax = LINE_BUF_SIZE, len = lenmax;
int c;
if(line == NULL)
return NULL;
for(;;) {
c = fgetc(fp);
if(c == EOF)
break;
if(--len == 0) {
len = lenmax;
char * linen = realloc(linep, lenmax *= 2);
if(linen == NULL) {
// Fail.
free(linep);
return NULL;
}
line = linen + (line - linep);
linep = linen;
}
if((*line++ = c) == '\n')
break;
}
*line = '\0';
return linep;
}
To read stdin:
char *line;
while ( line = getline_from(stdin) ) {
// do stuff
free(line);
}
To read some other file, I first open it with fopen():
FILE *fp;
fp = fopen ( filename, "rb" );
if (!fp) {
fprintf(stderr, "Cannot open %s: ", argv[1]);
perror(NULL);
exit(1);
}
char *line;
while ( line = getline_from(fp) ) {
// do stuff
free(line);
}
This works very nicely for me. I'd love to see an alternative that uses fgets() as suggested by #paul-tomblin, but I don't have the energy to figure it out tonight.