Hi,

I have to make a program that makes math exercises for kids. The program is written in C.

Part of the program is to read exercises from a .txt file and return a integer containing the number of exercises in the file.

the test .txt looks like this:

1 / 2 * 3 =
1 + 2 * 3 - 4 =
5 + 2 * 3 =
2 - 5 * 2 + 5 =
4 * 5 * 2 + 4 * 3 / 6 - 8 =

i thought i do this by counting the number of equal signs in the text and scan the file in pairs (integer/char) until i hit a equal sign which i then count.

But the problem is that i need to tell the program before hand how many pairs there are in the file. Is there a way i scan the entire file?

This is the code i made:

#include<stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>

int countExercises(char name[]);

int main()
{
char name[9]="test.txt";

countExercises(name);

system ("pause");

return 0;
}

int countExercises(char name[]){

int opperand,i=0,count=0;

char opperator, d='=';

FILE *read = fopen(name, "r");

do{
fscanf ( read ,"%d %c ", &opperand, &opperator);

if(opperator==d){
count++;
}
i++;
}while(i<21);


printf("%d\n\n",count);
}

Thanks in advance

Use the return value from fscanf to detect the end of file.

Your program doesn't handle the case where the file isn't formatted like you expect. I would use a function that reads unconditionally into a buffer first, and then parse the buffer. Then I would loop through the buffer a character at a time and count '=' as I go.

All the files will always be operator operand operator operand etc. so dont think i need to worry about that.

What is the return value? Can you give me a small example?

Thank you

It will serve you well for your academic journey, as well as any "real-world" experience, to code this the way the person suggested. Think beyond just this project's specifics.

Hey mate - I don't have much time, so I'm going to leave you to look up the details here, but the most efficient way to do this is to use low-level (or unbuffered) file IO routines (look in io.h) to open the file (returning a file handle), get the size (the routine is 'file_length()', I think - depends on your compiler), malloc a block big enough to hold the entire file, make ONE call to read() to get the whole thing, then loop through the buffer counting '=' as you suggest.

If I get time later, I'll post some code...

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs...ons/scanf.html

Thanks for all the help i really appreciate it