Split string with delimiters in C

Question

How do I write a function to split and return an array for a string with delimiters in the C programming language?

char* str = \"JAN,FEB,MAR,APR,MAY,JUN,JUL,         


        

Answer 1

This function takes a char* string and splits it by the deliminator. There can be multiple deliminators in a row. Note that the function modifies the orignal string. You must make a copy of the original string first if you need the original to stay unaltered. This function doesn't use any cstring function calls so it might be a little faster than others. If you don't care about memory allocation, you can allocate sub_strings at the top of the function with size strlen(src_str)/2 and (like the c++ "version" mentioned) skip the bottom half of the function. If you do this, the function is reduced to O(N), but the memory optimized way shown below is O(2N).

The function:

char** str_split(char *src_str, const char deliminator, size_t &num_sub_str){
  //replace deliminator's with zeros and count how many
  //sub strings with length >= 1 exist
  num_sub_str = 0;
  char *src_str_tmp = src_str;
  bool found_delim = true;
  while(*src_str_tmp){
    if(*src_str_tmp == deliminator){
      *src_str_tmp = 0;
      found_delim = true;
    }
    else if(found_delim){ //found first character of a new string
      num_sub_str++;
      found_delim = false;
      //sub_str_vec.push_back(src_str_tmp); //for c++
    }
    src_str_tmp++;
  }
  printf("Start - found %d sub strings\n", num_sub_str);
  if(num_sub_str <= 0){
    printf("str_split() - no substrings were found\n");
    return(0);
  }

  //if you want to use a c++ vector and push onto it, the rest of this function
  //can be omitted (obviously modifying input parameters to take a vector, etc)

  char **sub_strings = (char **)malloc( (sizeof(char*) * num_sub_str) + 1);
  const char *src_str_terminator = src_str_tmp;
  src_str_tmp = src_str;
  bool found_null = true;
  size_t idx = 0;
  while(src_str_tmp < src_str_terminator){
    if(!*src_str_tmp) //found a NULL
      found_null = true;
    else if(found_null){
      sub_strings[idx++] = src_str_tmp;
      //printf("sub_string_%d: [%s]\n", idx-1, sub_strings[idx-1]);
      found_null = false;
    }
    src_str_tmp++;
  }
  sub_strings[num_sub_str] = NULL;

  return(sub_strings);
}

How to use it:

  char months[] = "JAN,FEB,MAR,APR,MAY,JUN,JUL,AUG,SEP,OCT,NOV,DEC";
  char *str = strdup(months);
  size_t num_sub_str;
  char **sub_strings = str_split(str, ',', num_sub_str);
  char *endptr;
  if(sub_strings){
    for(int i = 0; sub_strings[i]; i++)
      printf("[%s]\n", sub_strings[i]);
  }
  free(sub_strings);
  free(str);