Read from line with sscanf, including whitespaces, breaking on other character

Question

I'm sorry for the sloppy title, but I didn't know how to format my question correctly. I'm trying to read a .txt, of which every line has information needed to fill a struct. First I use fgets to read the line, and then i was going to use sscanf to read the individual parts. Now here is where I'm stuck: normally sscanf breaks off parts on whitespaces, but I need the whitespace to be included. I know that sscanf allows ignoring whitespaces, but the tricky part is that I then need some other arbitrary character to separate the parts. For example, I have to break the line

Carl Sagan~Contact~scifi~1997

up into parts for Author,Name,Genre,year. You can see I need the space in Carl Sagan, but I need the function to break off the strings on the tilde character. Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

If your input is delimited by ~ or for instance any specific character: Use this:

sscanf(s, "%[^~]", name);

[^ is conversion type, that matches all characters except the ones listed, ending with ]

Here is the sample program for testing it:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argv, char **argc)
{
    char *s = "Carl Sagan~Contact~scifi~1997";
    char name[100], contact[100], genre[100];
    int yr;

    sscanf(s, "%99[^~]~%99[^~]~%99[^~]~%d", name, contact, genre, &yr);
    printf("%s\n%s\n%s\n%d\n", name, contact, genre, yr);

    return 0;
}