Using `strtok` on a string causes unexpected behavior in C - why does it skip tokens?
I'm integrating two systems and I've been researching this but I've been banging my head against this for hours..... Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy. After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out. I'm encountering an unexpected issue when using `strtok` in C that causes it to skip tokens in my string. I'm working with a simple CSV parser where I need to split lines by commas. Here's the relevant snippet of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> void parse_csv_line(const char *line) { char *token; char line_copy[256]; strcpy(line_copy, line); token = strtok(line_copy, ","); while (token != NULL) { printf("Token: %s\n", token); token = strtok(NULL, ","); } } int main() { const char *csv_line = "apple,banana,,cherry,orange"; parse_csv_line(csv_line); return 0; } ``` When I run this code, I expect to see "apple", "banana", "", "cherry", and "orange" printed as tokens. However, the output skips the empty token between "banana" and "cherry". The printed tokens are: ``` Token: apple Token: banana Token: cherry Token: orange ``` I initialized `line_copy` with a fixed size and used `strcpy` to duplicate the original line. I thought that `strtok` would handle consecutive delimiters by returning an empty string for them. However, it seems to only return non-empty tokens. I've also checked the man page for `strtok`, and it mentions that it treats consecutive delimiters as a single delimiter, but I expected it to return empty tokens for them. I tried using a different approach by replacing consecutive commas with a unique character before calling `strtok`, but that feels hacky and complicates the code. Is there a more straightforward way to ensure that I capture empty tokens when using `strtok`? Am I misunderstanding how `strtok` is supposed to work? Any insights or alternate methods would be greatly appreciated! For context: I'm using C on Ubuntu. Any help would be greatly appreciated! For context: I'm using C on Ubuntu. Any help would be greatly appreciated! What am I doing wrong? This is happening in both development and production on macOS. Could someone point me to the right documentation? I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning C.