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C read file

hamza
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2022-05-18
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C read file

How to read a file in C? You already know what a file is and their types (text/binary (audio/images/video etc.)). When a computer is off, they are present on the hard disk.

Suppose you made a C program last week to sort numbers, and you wish to see the program again. How do you do it? You locate the file on the system and open it in an IDE/text editor. That is cool! But what's more interesting is to open the file through your program.

For simplicity, we discuss reading text files only.

Let's write a C program to open a file from a hard disk whose name is entered by a user and to display its contents on the screen. Opening a file means we bring the file contents from disk to RAM to perform operations (read/modify/append a file) on it. The file must be present in the directory in which the executable file of the program exists.

Function fopen is used to open a file; it returns a pointer to structure FILE, which is a predefined structure in the "stdio.h" header file. If the file opening is successful, then it returns a pointer to the file, and if it's unable to open it, then it returns NULL.

Function fgetc returns a character read from the file, and the fclose function closes the file.

C programming,
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hamza
2022-05-18
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#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main()
{
   char ch, file_name[25];
   FILE *fp;

   printf("Enter name of a file you wish to see\n");
   gets(file_name);

   fp = fopen(file_name, "r"); // read mode

   if (fp == NULL)
   {
      perror("Error while opening the file.\n");
      exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
   }

   printf("The contents of %s file are:\n", file_name);

   while((ch = fgetc(fp)) != EOF)
      printf("%c", ch);

   fclose(fp);
   return 0;
}

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