How to play with strings in C

Split a string into tokens - strtok

In this lesson we'll learn how to split a string into several tokens using strtok function. To split a string we need delimiters - delimiters are characters which will be used to split the string.

Suppose, we've the following string and we want to extract the individual words.

char str[] = "strtok needs to be called several times to split a string";

The words are separated by space. So space will be our delimiter.

char delim[] = " ";

strtok accepts two strings - the first one is the string to split, the second one is a string containing all delimiters. In this case there is only one delimiter. strtok returns a pointer to the character of next token. So the first time it is called, it will point to the first word.

char *ptr = strtok(str, delim);

strtok needs to be called several times to split a string
^
ptr points here

But there is another thing. strtok modifies the original string. It puts NULL characters ('\0') at the delimiter position after every call to strtok so that tokens can be tracked. strtok also internally remembers the next token's starting position. So after the first call to strtok, the str, ptr and next token position looks like as follows:

strtok\0needs to be called several times to split a string
^       ^
|       next token
|
ptr points here

In the next call to strtok, the first parameter needs to be NULL so that strtok starts splitting the string from the next token's starting position it remembers.

ptr = strtok(NULL, delim);

strtok returns NULL when there is no more tokens, i.e., the whole string is split. This can be utilized to know when to stop calling strtok. Putting it all together in complete example below.

Warning: Because strtok modifies original string, character pointer to read-only string shouldn't be passed to strtok. The following examples will trigger undefined behaviour because the first parameter to strtok is read-only string:

char *str = "strtok needs to be called several times to split a string";
/* char *ptr = strtok(str, delim); */ /* Fatal: read-only string passed to first parameter of strtok */

/* char *ptr = strtok("strtok needs to be called several times to split a string", delim); */ /* Fatal: read-only string passed to first parameter of strtok */

If you don't want the original string to be modified, create a copy of the original string using strcpy and pass that copy to strtok.

The delimiter doesn't have to be a single character. It can contain multiple characters and splitting will be performed for any of the characters. Following is another example with multiple delimiters: