strtok(3)

strtok3

String tokens

Usage

#include <string.h>

char *

strtok(char *restrict str, const char *restrict sep);

char *

strtok_r(char *restrict str, const char *restrict sep, char **restrict lasts);

Library

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

Overview

This interface is obsoleted by strsep(3).

The strtok() function is used to isolate sequential tokens in a null-terminated string, str. These tokens are separated in the string by at least one of the characters in sep. The first time that strtok() is called, str should be specified; subsequent calls, wishing to obtain further tokens from the same string, should pass a null pointer instead. The separator string, sep, must be supplied each time, and may change between calls.

The implementation will behave as if no library function calls strtok().

The strtok_r() function is a reentrant version of strtok(). The context pointer last must be provided on each call. The strtok_r() function may also be used to nest two parsing loops within one another, as long as separate context pointers are used.

Return values

The strtok() and strtok_r() functions return a pointer to the beginning of each subsequent token in the string, after replacing the token itself with a NUL character. When no more tokens remain, a null pointer is returned.

Examples

The following uses strtok_r() to parse two strings using separate contexts:

char test[80], blah[80];
char *sep = "\\/:;=-";
char *word, *phrase, *brkt, *brkb;
strcpy(test, "This;is.a:test:of=the/string\\tokenizer-function.");
for (word = strtok_r(test, sep, &brkt);
     word;
     word = strtok_r(NULL, sep, &brkt))
{
    strcpy(blah, "blah:blat:blab:blag");
    for (phrase = strtok_r(blah, sep, &brkb);
         phrase;
         phrase = strtok_r(NULL, sep, &brkb))
    {
        printf("So far we're at %s:%s\n", word, phrase);
    }
}

Releases

163 releases since Mac OS X 10.0; the text changed 5 times.

  1. 10.0–10.1.5
  2. 10.2–10.2.8
  3. 10.3–10.4.11
  4. 10.5–10.6.8
  5. 10.7–26.3
  6. 26.4–26.5

Standards

The strtok() function conforms to ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (“ISO C90”). The strtok_r() function conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”).

Authors

Wes Peters ⟨[email protected]⟩, Softweyr LLC

Based on the FreeBSD 3.0 implementation.

Bugs

The System V strtok(), if handed a string containing only delimiter characters, will not alter the next starting point, so that a call to strtok() with a different (or empty) delimiter string may return a non-NULL value. Since this implementation always alters the next starting point, such a sequence of calls would always return NULL.

From Libc 1752.120.2 in macOS 26.5. Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.