Read file without fopen() (C language)

Question

I am working on a school project in which we have to do some operations (select, min, max) on a table saved in .txt file. The problem is that we can\'t use common functions

Answer 1

There are few ways to acomplish this.

Reading STDIN

I guess the teacher wants this method in particular. The idea is reading standard input rather than particular file. In C++ you can simply read the stdin object. Here's an example:

#include 
#include 

int main(void)
{
  char str[80];
  int i;

  printf("Enter a string: ");
  fgets(str, 10, stdin);

  /* remove newline, if present */
  i = strlen(str)-1;
  if( str[ i ] == '\n')
      str[i] = '\0';

  printf("This is your string: %s", str);

  return 0;
}

Source: http://www.java2s.com/Code/C/Console/Usefgetstoreadstringfromstandardinput.htm

Using system utils

You can call "type" util @ Windows (not sure about it) or "cat" util in Linux as a subprocess to read some partticular file. But this is rather a "hack", so I do not recommend using this one.