Fgets
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- The correct title of this article is fgets. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
fgets is a function in C programming language that reads a string of characters with a specific length from a given file stream source. As far as traceable, fgets stands for file get string. It is included in the C standard library header file stdio.h.
The fgets function terminates reading after a new-line character is found. The length argument includes space needed for the null character which will be appended to the end of the string. As a result, to read N characters, the length specification must be specified as N+1. The string read is returned. The prototype of the function is as follows:
char* fgets(char *string, int length, FILE * stream)
The stream argument specifies from which stream will the string be read from. stdin is commonly used here, for reading from the standard input. Otherwise, a FILE * value returned by the fopen function is used.
[edit] Sample usage
The following code reads characters from the console input and prints them out 20 in a line with the puts function until an EOF occurs.
#include <stdio.h>
#define MAX_LEN 20
int main(void)
{
char string[MAX_LEN + 1]; /* One extra byte needed
* for the null character
*/
while(fgets(string, MAX_LEN + 1, stdin) != NULL)
puts(string);
return 0;
}
