Is this a valid use of fgetc?

Question

My input stream is from a text file with a list of words separated by the \n character. The function stringcompare is a function that will compare the equivalence of two strings, case insensitive.

I have two string arrays, word[50] and dict[50]. word is a string that would be given by the user. Basically what I want to do is pass word[] and each word in the text file as arguments of the stringcompare function.

I've compiled and run this code but it is wrong. Very wrong. What am I doing wrong? Can I even use fgetc() like this? would dict[] even be a string array after the inner loop is done?

        char c, r;
        while((c = fgetc(in)) != EOF){ 
            while((r = fgetc(in)) != '\n'){
                dict[n] = r;
                n++;

            }
            dict[n+1] = '\0'; //is this necessary?
            stringcompare(word, dict);
        }

Answer 1

It is wrong.

• The return value of fgetc() should be stored to int, not char, especially when it will be compared with EOF.
• You might forgot to initialize n.
• You will miss the first character of each line, which is stored to c.
• Use dict[n] = '\0'; instead of dict[n+1] = '\0'; because n is already incremented in the loop.

Possible fix:

int c, r;
while((c = fgetc(in)) != EOF){ 
    ungetc(c, in); // push the read character back to the stream for reading by fgetc later
    n = 0;
    // add check for EOF and buffer overrun for safety
    while((r = fgetc(in)) != '\n' && r != EOF && n + 1 < sizeof(dict) / sizeof(dict[0])){
        dict[n] = r;
        n++;

    }
    dict[n] = '\0'; //this is necessary
    stringcompare(word, dict);
}