NAME

xt_strsplit() - Split a string into tokens

LIBRARY

#include <xtend/string.h>
-lxtend

SYNOPSIS

int     xt_strsplit(char *string, char ***array, const char *sep)

ARGUMENTS

string  String to be parsed for tokens
array   Pointer array to be filled with tokens
sep     Character string listing all recognized separators

DESCRIPTION

xt_strsplit() splits a string into tokens separated by any character in the string argument sep. The function interface is similar to split() in awk, except that sep is a simple list of characters rather than a regular expression.

The array argument should be the address of a char ** variable. xt_strsplit() allocates memory for the pointers as needed and assigns one token to each pointer.

xt_strsplit() should only be used when an array of strings representing the tokens is actually needed. In cases where each token can be immediately processed and forgotten, use a loop with strsep(). Introducing arrays into a program unnecessarily should avoided as a habit to maximize speed and minimize memory use.

Caution: xt_strsplit() is destructive: It replaces the separators in string with null bytes. To preserve the original string, duplicate it with strdup() first and pass the copy to xt_strsplit().

RETURN VALUES

The number of tokens into which string is separated, or 0 if a memory allocation or other failure occurred.

EXAMPLES

char    *string = "1,2,3,4,5", *copy, **array;
size_t  c, tokens;
copy = strdup(string);
tokens = xt_strsplit(copy, &array, ",");
for (int c = 0; c < tokens; ++c)


    puts(array[c]);