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NAME |C SYNOPSIS |DESCRIPTION |COMPATIBILITY |SEE ALSO |COLOPHON | |
PMFSTRING(3) Library Functions ManualPMFSTRING(3)
pmfstring- safe string scanning
#include <pcp/pmapi.h>ssize_t pmfstring(FILE *f, char **str);cc ... -lpcp
pmfstringis a safe string scanning routine with semantics similar tofscanf(3) with the%sformat specifier. It scans the input stream fromf skipping initial whitespace characters, then accumu‐ lating all the subsequent non-whitespace characters. The main difference is thatpmfstringallocates the result bufferstr using themalloc(3) family and ensures thatstr is (a) large enough and (b) null-byte terminated. Additionallypmfstringdoes not consider \n to be a whitespace character in the initial scan (before fillingstr) and so will not scan past the end of the current line, which is different tofscanf(3) and better aligned with the PCP use cases. The caller is responsible for maintaining a reference tostr or callingfree(3) to release the associated storage. On success,pmfstringreturns the length ofstr (the same length asstrlen(3) would return) that is guaranteed to be not less than 1. Failure is indicated by one of the following, andstr is not as‐ signed a value: • 0 to indicate no non-whitespace characters were found before the end of the current line from the streamf • -1 ( akaEOF) to indicate end of file on the streamf • -2 to indicate some more serious failure, probably in themalloc(3) routines; refer toerrno for more information
pmfstringhas similar semantics to the%msformat specifier in some versions offscanf(3) and the C99fscanf_s(3) routine - un‐ fortunately neither of these is portable.
free(3),fscanf(3),malloc(3) andstrlen(3).
This page is part of thePCP (Performance Co-Pilot) project. In‐ formation about the project can be found at ⟨http://www.pcp.io/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual page, send it to pcp@groups.io. This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository ⟨https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the repository was 2025-08-11.) If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which isnot part of the original manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.orgPerformance Co-Pilot PCPPMFSTRING(3)HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 byMichael Kerrisk, author ofThe Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depthLinux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, lookhere. Hosting byjambit GmbH. | |