Ubuntu Manpage: fparseln — return the next logical line from a stream

Provided by: libbsd-dev_0.12.1-1build1.1_amd64

NAME

       fparseln — return the next logical line from a stream

LIBRARY

       Utility functions from BSD systems (libbsd, -lbsd)

SYNOPSIS

       #include <stdio.h>
       (See libbsd(7) for include usage.)

       char *
       fparseln(FILE *stream, size_t *len, size_t *lineno, const char delim[3], int flags);

DESCRIPTION

The fparseln() function returns a pointer to the next logical line from the stream referenced by stream.
This string is NUL terminated and it is dynamically allocated on each invocation. It is the
responsibility of the caller to free the pointer.

By default, if a character is escaped, both it and the preceding escape character will be present in the
returned string. Various flags alter this behaviour.

The meaning of the arguments is as follows:

stream The stream to read from.

len If not NULL, the length of the string is stored in the memory location to which it points.

lineno If not NULL, the value of the memory location to which is pointed to, is incremented by the
number of lines actually read from the file.

delim Contains the escape, continuation, and comment characters. If a character is NUL then processing
for that character is disabled. If NULL, all characters default to values specified below. The
contents of delim is as follows:

delim[0] The escape character, which defaults to \, is used to remove any special meaning from
the next character.

delim[1] The continuation character, which defaults to \, is used to indicate that the next line
should be concatenated with the current one if this character is the last character on
the current line and is not escaped.

delim[2] The comment character, which defaults to #, if not escaped indicates the beginning of a
comment that extends until the end of the current line.

flags If non-zero, alter the operation of fparseln(). The various flags, which may be or-ed together,
are:

FPARSELN_UNESCCOMM Remove escape preceding an escaped comment.

FPARSELN_UNESCCONT Remove escape preceding an escaped continuation.

FPARSELN_UNESCESC Remove escape preceding an escaped escape.

FPARSELN_UNESCREST Remove escape preceding any other character.

FPARSELN_UNESCALL All of the above.

RETURN VALUES

       Upon successful completion a pointer to the parsed line is returned; otherwise, NULL is returned.

       The  fparseln()  function  uses  internally getline(3), so all error conditions that apply to getline(3),
       apply to fparseln().  In addition fparseln() may set errno to [ENOMEM] and return NULL if it runs out  of
       memory.

HISTORY