👀 Views: 1 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-07

c csv parsing C

I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm trying to parse a CSV file in C using `fgets` to read each line followed by `strtok` to split the line into tokens. However, I keep working with unexpected behavior where `strtok` seems to skip over some fields, especially when fields contain commas. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> int main() { FILE *file = fopen("data.csv", "r"); if (!file) { perror("Could not open file"); return 1; } char line[256]; while (fgets(line, sizeof(line), file)) { char *token = strtok(line, ","); while (token) { printf("%s\n", token); token = strtok(NULL, ","); } } fclose(file); return 0; } ``` The CSV I’m working with looks like this: ``` name,age,city John Doe,30,"New York, NY" Jane Smith,25,"Los Angeles, CA" ``` When I run the program, the output is: ``` name age city John Doe 30 New York NY Jane Smith 25 Los Angeles CA ``` I expected `"New York, NY"` to be treated as a single token, but it seems to split into two. I've tried various approaches, such as changing the delimiter to a different character temporarily, but I still encounter issues when the fields contain commas. Is there a better way to handle CSV parsing in C without introducing a complex state machine? Any advice or best practices would be greatly appreciated! What's the best practice here?