strsep3

Usage

Library

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

Overview

The strsep() function locates, in the string referenced by *stringp, the first occurrence of any character in the string delim (or the terminating ‘\0’ character) and replaces it with a ‘\0’. The location of the next character after the delimiter character (or NULL, if the end of the string was reached) is stored in *stringp. The original value of *stringp is returned.

An “empty” field (i.e., a character in the string delim occurs as the first character of *stringp) can be detected by comparing the location referenced by the returned pointer to ‘\0’.

If *stringp is initially NULL, strsep() returns NULL.

Examples

The following uses strsep() to parse a string, and prints each token in separate line:

char *token, *string, *tofree;
tofree = string = strdup("abc,def,ghi");
assert(string != NULL);
while ((token = strsep(&string, ",")) != NULL)
	printf("%s\n", token);
free(tofree);

The following uses strsep() to parse a string, containing tokens delimited by white space, into an argument vector:

char **ap, *argv[10], *inputstring;
for (ap = argv; (*ap = strsep(&inputstring, " \t")) != NULL;)
	if (**ap != '\0')
		if (++ap >= &argv[10])
			break;