Coding a Solution to an Ugly Character Mess

[Ja4Coltrane]

Hello!

I am working on some software to control oscilloscopes and function generators in a physics lab. The situation I am faced with at the moment is to be able to translate integers into a form which can be loaded into a device.

So basically I have a file which looks like this:

(1)**NEXT**(2)**NEXT**...**NEXT**(16383)

where (n) is actually something really crazy (possibly including whitespace). (The actual file starts like "^A**NEXT**^B**NEXT**...).

I am trying to write a program in C which will let me input any int n with 1<=n and n<=16383 and which will go through the file to find (n) and output it.

So basically it is a problem of dealing with an ugly mess of characters. Do you all have any suggestions or know of any built in functions which might be useful for this?

Also, when using file input in C, I tend to run into the problem where I can only move forward in the file. Is there an easy way to move backwards as well? What about a way of searching for the next "**NEXT**"? Anyway, sorry about the long question. Any advice at all would be nice!

Thanks!

 

[CylonMath]

Hello,

If this is a binary file containing integers , you can use
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdio/fread/" functions for file I/O

in addition to that,
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdio/fseek/" function allows you to move file pointer forward or backwards (as you want).

 

[rcgldr]

If this is being implemnted on PC, chances are that your file will easily fit into memory, so you might as well read the entire file in a sufficiently large allocated block of memory.

If the CPU is intel based, there's a fast search for character option, memchr().

BYTE  abNext = "**NEXT**"
PBYTE pMem;
PBYTE pCurrent;
PBYTE pSearch;
int   iCount;
int   iSkip;

    pMem = malloc(0x100000)   // allocate 16mb ram

//  read file, store # of bytes in iCount

    pCurrent = pMem;

    while(1){
        if( (iCount <= 0) ||
            ((PBYTE)0 == pSearch = (PBYTE) memchr(pCurrent, '*', iCount))){
            // ... end of file
        break;
        }
        if(0 == memcmp(pCurrent, abNext, sizeof(abNext){
            // ... match found
            iSkip += (pSearch-pCurrent) + sizeof(abNext) + ...;
            pCurrent += iSkip;
            iCount -= iSkip;
        }
    }

 

[rcgldr]

pMem = malloc( 0x100000) // allocate 16mb ram

Allocated size was wrong, that was 1mb

    pMem0 = malloc(  0x100000)   // allocate   1mb ram
    pMem1 = malloc( 0x1000000)   // allocate  16mb ram
    pMem2 = malloc(0x10000000)   // allocate 256mb ram