STRTOK(3) BSD Programmer's Manual STRTOK(3)
strtok, strtok_r - string token operations
#include <string.h> char * strtok(char *str, const char *sep); char * strtok_r(char *str, const char *sep, char **last);
This interface is obsoleted by strsep(3). The strtok() function is used to isolate sequential tokens in a NUL- terminated string, str. These tokens are separated in the string by at least one of the characters in sep. The first time that strtok() is called, str should be specified; subsequent calls, wishing to obtain further tokens from the same string, should pass a null pointer instead. The separator string, sep, must be supplied each time, and may change between calls. The strtok_r() function is a version of strtok() that takes an explicit context argument and is reentrant. The strtok() and strtok_r() functions return a pointer to the beginning of each subsequent token in the string, after replacing the separator character itself with an ASCII NUL character. When no more tokens remain, a null pointer is returned. Since strtok() and strtok_r() modify the string, str should not point to an area in the initialized data segment.
The following will construct an array of pointers to each individual word in the string s: #define MAXTOKENS 128 char s[512], *p, *tokens[MAXTOKENS]; char *last; int i = 0; snprintf(s, sizeof(s), "cat dog horse cow"); for ((p = strtok_r(s, " ", &last)); p; (p = strtok_r(NULL, " ", &last))) { if (i < MAXTOKENS - 1) tokens[i++] = p; } tokens[i] = NULL; That is, tokens[0] will point to "cat", tokens[1] will point to "dog", tokens[2] will point to "horse", and tokens[3] will point to "cow".
memchr(3), strchr(3), strcspn(3), strpbrk(3), strrchr(3), strsep(3), strspn(3), strstr(3)
The strtok() function conforms to ANSI X3.159-1989 ("ANSI C89").
The System V strtok(), if handed a string containing only delimiter char- acters, will not alter the next starting point, so that a call to strtok() with a different (or empty) delimiter string may return a non- null value. Since this implementation always alters the next starting point, such a sequence of calls would always return NULL. MirBSD #10-current June 29, 1991 1