CSCI 2510: Studio 6

Parsing String Input

Parsing input in C is initially more difficult than in other, higher level, languages. However, the C library includes a wide variety of functions that make input handling straightforward after you've spent a little time in practice.

In this studio, you will:

1. Get user input with fgets()
2. Parse the input string with strtok()
3. Pack input data into your own char* argv[] structure
4. Execute programs with execvp()

Please complete the required exercises below, as well as any optional enrichment exercises that you wish to complete.

As you work through these exercises, please record your answers in a text file. When finished, submit your work via the Git repository.

Make sure that the name of each person who worked on these exercises is listed in the first answer, and make sure you number each of your responses so it is easy to match your responses with each exercise.

Required Exercises

1. As the answer to the first exercise, list the names of the people who worked together on this studio.

2. Write a short program that:
   1. Prompts the user to enter input
   2. Gets user input using the function fgets()
   3. Prints the user input back to the console with printf("%s\n", input_string)

   See the man page for fgets() for more detail. You will need to declare a sufficiently large char buffer[] to store user input, and you should read from the standard input stream ('stdin').

   Copy and paste the output of your program once it runs correctly.

3. Now we want to parse the input string and divide it into individual tokens. For this we can use the function strtok(), which parses a string from left to right and returns one token each time you call the function. Pull up the strtok() manual page and read the first paragraph. What difference is there between the initial call to strtok() and subsequent calls that parse the same string?

4. The delimiter character tells the strtok() function which character marks the boundary of tokens. What delimiter character should you use for regular text input?

5. Make a call to strtok() so that your program parses the first token from the user input. Print this first token on a new line.

   Copy and paste your program output once this works correctly.

6. Now use an appropriate loop so that your program parses and prints each token in the user input on a separate line. Copy and paste your program output once this is done.

7. One strange artifact you might notice is an extra newline that is printed after the last token. This is because your input string automatically contains a new line character at its end. For example, if you enter:

   This is an input string.

   The actual string recieved by your program is:

   "This is an input string.\n"

   We want to strip this trailing newline character, as it will cause problems for us later. There are a variety of approaches to doing this, such as using the strlen() or strchr() functions, or even the strtok() function itself. Modify your program to strip the newline character after your call to fgets(), but before you start parsing. Try a Google search for "strip newline character in C" if you would like some further inspiration.

   As the answer to this exercise, copy and paste your newline stripping code.

8. Lastly, we want to re-purpose this studio program as a springboard to executing arbitrary programs for Lab 2. Rather than just tokenizing input for the fun of it, we will now modify the studio so that it interprets our input as a program to execute. For example, if the user inputs the string "ls -l" then your program should execute the command ls -l. We will use the function execvp().

   The execvp() function takes two arguments. First, a char* that contains the command we want to execute (e.g. "ls" from above). Second, a char* argv[] structure.

   Declare the following variables and leave this answer blank.

   int max_args = 15;
int max_argv_size = max_args + 2; //one for argv[0], one for null terminator
char* cmd;
char* my_argv[max_argv_size];

9. Filling out the cmd variable is easy. This will always be the first token returned from strtok(). Note that strtok() returns a char* and this is exactly the type we have declared for cmd.

   Copy and paste your assignment statement as the answer to this exercise.

10. Filling out my_argv is slightly trickier. First, observe that my_argv is simply an array of char* pointers. Second, recall that the regular argv variable always has the name of the command as the first element (argv[0]), and is always terminated by a NULL character.

    Start by assigning "my_argv[0] = cmd;". Then, parse the rest of the user input string and assign each subsequent token to each subsequent position. For example, if the result of strtok() is stored as such:

    res = strtok(NULL, " ");

    Then assign each token thusly, for an appropriate value of i:

    my_argv[i] = res;

    IMPORTANT: After there are no more tokens to parse, assign the next element of my_argv the NULL character:

    my_argv[after_last] = '\0';

    Copy and paste your my_argv[] code as the answer.

11. Lastly, after you have constructed cmd and my_argv, insert the following call to execvp():

    execvp( cmd, my_argv );

    If the two variables are constructed correctly, your program should read the user input, parse it as though it were a new program to execute, and then execute that program with execvp()

    Copy and paste a working output as the answer to this question.

Optional Enrichment Exercises

1. No optional exercises