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

Two issues surrounding this question are memory management and thread safety. As you can see from the numerous posts, this isn't an easy task to accomplish seamlessly in C. I desired a solution that is:

• Thread safe. (strtok is not thread safe)
• Does not employ malloc or any of it's derivatives (to avoid memory management issues)
• Checks array bounds on the individual fields (to avoid segment faults on unknown data)
• Works with multi-byte field separators (utf-8)
• ignores extra fields in the input
• provides soft error routine for invalid field lengths

The solution I came up meets all of these criteria. It's probably a little more work to setup than some other solutions posted here, but I think that in practice, the extra work is worth it in order to avoid the common pitfalls of other solutions.

#include 
#include 

struct splitFieldType {
    char *field;
    int   maxLength;
};

typedef struct splitFieldType splitField;

int strsplit(splitField *fields, int expected, const char *input, const char *fieldSeparator, void (*softError)(int fieldNumber,int expected,int actual))  {
    int i;
    int fieldSeparatorLen=strlen(fieldSeparator);
    const char *tNext, *tLast=input;

    for (i=0; i=fields[i].maxLength) {
            softError(i,fields[i].maxLength-1,len);
            len=fields[i].maxLength-1;
        }
        fields[i].field[len]=0;
        strncpy(fields[i].field,tLast,len);
        tLast=tNext+fieldSeparatorLen;
    }
    if (ifields[i].maxLength) {
            softError(i,fields[i].maxLength,strlen(tLast));
        } else {
            strcpy(fields[i].field,tLast);
        }
        return i+1;
    } else {
        return i;
    }
}


void monthSplitSoftError(int fieldNumber, int expected, int actual) {
    fprintf(stderr,"monthSplit: input field #%d is %d bytes, expected %d bytes\n",fieldNumber+1,actual,expected);
}


int main() {
  const char *fieldSeparator=",";
  const char *input="JAN,FEB,MAR,APRI,MAY,JUN,JUL,AUG,SEP,OCT,NOV,DEC,FOO,BAR";

  struct monthFieldsType {
    char field1[4];
    char field2[4];
    char field3[4];
    char field4[4];
    char field5[4];
    char field6[4];
    char field7[4];
    char field8[4];
    char field9[4];
    char field10[4];
    char field11[4];
    char field12[4];
  } monthFields;

  splitField inputFields[12] = {
    {monthFields.field1,  sizeof(monthFields.field1)},
    {monthFields.field2,  sizeof(monthFields.field2)},
    {monthFields.field3,  sizeof(monthFields.field3)},
    {monthFields.field4,  sizeof(monthFields.field4)},
    {monthFields.field5,  sizeof(monthFields.field5)},
    {monthFields.field6,  sizeof(monthFields.field6)},
    {monthFields.field7,  sizeof(monthFields.field7)},
    {monthFields.field8,  sizeof(monthFields.field8)},
    {monthFields.field9,  sizeof(monthFields.field9)},
    {monthFields.field10, sizeof(monthFields.field10)},
    {monthFields.field11, sizeof(monthFields.field11)},
    {monthFields.field12, sizeof(monthFields.field12)}
  };

  int expected=sizeof(inputFields)/sizeof(splitField);

  printf("input data: %s\n", input);
  printf("expecting %d fields\n",expected);

  int ct=strsplit(inputFields, expected, input, fieldSeparator, monthSplitSoftError);

  if (ct!=expected) {
    printf("string split %d fields, expected %d\n", ct,expected);
  }

  for (int i=0;i

Below is an example compile and output. Note that in my example, I purposefully spelled out "APRIL" so that you can see how the soft error works.

$ gcc strsplitExample.c && ./a.out
input data: JAN,FEB,MAR,APRIL,MAY,JUN,JUL,AUG,SEP,OCT,NOV,DEC,FOO,BAR
expecting 12 fields
monthSplit: input field #4 is 5 bytes, expected 3 bytes
field 1: JAN
field 2: FEB
field 3: MAR
field 4: APR
field 5: MAY
field 6: JUN
field 7: JUL
field 8: AUG
field 9: SEP
field 10: OCT
field 11: NOV
field 12: DEC

Direct structure access, field 10: OCT

Enjoy!