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Unexpected Output When Using `strtok` with Variable-Length Strings in C

👀 Views: 34 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-12
c string-manipulation strtok C

I'm confused about I'm collaborating on a project where This might be a silly question, but I'm working on a personal project and Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm working with unexpected behavior when using `strtok` to tokenize variable-length strings in my C program... The function seems to be skipping tokens or returning NULL for some inputs unexpectedly. For example, when trying to split the following string: ```c char input[] = "Hello, this is a test string."; char *token; // Using strtok to tokenize the input string char *delimiters = " ,."; token = strtok(input, delimiters); while (token != NULL) { printf("Token: %s\n", token); token = strtok(NULL, delimiters); } ``` The expected output should be: ``` Token: Hello Token: this Token: is Token: a Token: test Token: string ``` However, the output I receive is inconsistent, sometimes missing tokens or returning empty lines. I've tried initializing the string differently and ensuring that the delimiters cover all spaces, commas, and periods. I also checked for buffer overflow issues, but the string length is well within limits. Is there something I'm missing with how `strtok` handles the input string or its state between calls? Is there a better approach to achieve consistent tokenization for variable-length strings? I'm currently compiling with GCC version 11.2.0 on Ubuntu 20.04, and I haven't defined any custom preprocessor directives that could affect this behavior. My development environment is Ubuntu. What's the best practice here? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, I really appreciate it! This issue appeared after updating to C LTS. What are your experiences with this? This is my first time working with C latest. Any examples would be super helpful. I'm working in a Ubuntu 20.04 environment.