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Using `fgets` with `strtok` results in advanced patterns in C - Need clarification on buffer issues

👀 Views: 0 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-15
C fgets strtok buffer overflow tokenization

I'm collaborating on a project where I'm working through a tutorial and Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock..... I'm working with a question when using `fgets` to read input and then `strtok` to tokenize it in C. The function `fgets` is reading the input as expected, but when I try to tokenize that string, the output is not what I anticipated. Here's a snippet of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> int main() { char buffer[100]; char *token; printf("Enter a string: "); if (fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), stdin) != NULL) { // Remove newline character if present buffer[strcspn(buffer, "\n")] = 0; printf("You entered: %s\n", buffer); } token = strtok(buffer, " "); while (token != NULL) { printf("Token: %s\n", token); token = strtok(NULL, " "); } return 0; } ``` When I run this program and input a string like "Hello World", it works fine, but if I input a string with multiple spaces (e.g., "Hello World"), I get unexpected behavior: it prints empty tokens for each extra space. I expected `strtok` to handle this gracefully. Is there a better way to handle such cases, or is this the intended behavior? I have tried using `strtok_r`, but it doesn't seem to help either. Any tips on improving this code would be appreciated! This is part of a larger CLI tool I'm building. I'm working with C in a Docker container on macOS. Hoping someone can shed some light on this. I'm using C stable in this project. Any suggestions would be helpful. For reference, this is a production service. Thanks for any help you can provide!