STRSEP(3)						   BSD Library Functions Manual 						 STRSEP(3)

NAME

     strsep -- separate strings

LIBRARY

     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

     #include <string.h>

     char *
     strsep(char **stringp, const char *delim);

DESCRIPTION

     The strsep() function locates, in the string referenced by *stringp, the first occurrence of any character in the string delim (or the termi-
     nating '' character) and replaces it with a ''.  The location of the next character after the delimiter character (or NULL, if the end of
     the string was reached) is stored in *stringp.  The original value of *stringp is returned.

     An ``empty'' field (i.e., a character in the string delim occurs as the first character of *stringp) can be detected by comparing the loca-
     tion referenced by the returned pointer to ''.

     If *stringp is initially NULL, strsep() returns NULL.

EXAMPLES

     The following uses strsep() to parse a string, and prints each token in separate line:

	   char *token, *string, *tofree;

	   tofree = string = strdup("abc,def,ghi");
	   assert(string != NULL);

	   while ((token = strsep(&string, ",")) != NULL)
		   printf("%s
", token);

	   free(tofree);

     The following uses strsep() to parse a string, containing tokens delimited by white space, into an argument vector:

	   char **ap, *argv[10], *inputstring;

	   for (ap = argv; (*ap = strsep(&inputstring, " 	")) != NULL;)
		   if (**ap != '')
			   if (++ap >= &argv[10])
				   break;

SEE ALSO

     memchr(3), strchr(3), strcspn(3), strpbrk(3), strrchr(3), strspn(3), strstr(3), strtok(3)

HISTORY

     The strsep() function is intended as a replacement for the strtok() function.  While the strtok() function should be preferred for portabil-
     ity reasons (it conforms to ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (``ISO C90'')) it is unable to handle empty fields, i.e., detect fields delimited by two adja-
     cent delimiter characters, or to be used for more than a single string at a time.	The strsep() function first appeared in 4.4BSD.

BSD
								 December 5, 2008							       BSD