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This library is an experiment I did in 2019 when trying to understand how to parse strings safely in C.
5 years of C later, I would now recommend using string slices (also called strings view) over using strsepf (a sscanf-like interface).

That being said, have fun reading this code!

strsepf

strsepf purpose is to be a string parsing function combining the memory safety of strsep and the convenience of a sscanf-like interface. It's designed to be a safer sscanf for embedded system applications.

Some key design choices:

• No dynamic memory allocation
• Will destroy its input string (by adding '\0')
• C11
• No floating point support
• Re-entrant (RTOS safe)
• Incremental single-pass parsing
• Library code is covered with unit-tests

Example 1:

// Parse IP string
char                   myIP[] = "192.168.0.13";
char const* const ipStringFmt = "%3d.%3d.%3d.%3d";

uint32_t ip0 = 0;
uint32_t ip1 = 0;
uint32_t ip2 = 0;
uint32_t ip3 = 0;
int16_t  n = strsepf(myIP, ipStringFmt, &ip0, &ip1, &ip2, &ip3);

TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(192, ip0);
TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(168, ip1);
TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(0,   ip2);
TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(13,  ip3);
TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(4,   n);

Example 2:

// Parse string NMEA (GPS) message
// - GPBWC 1st argument is a number   (UTC time of fix)
// - GPBWC 7th argument is a string   (degrees true)
char                  msg[] = "$GPBWC,081837,,,,,,T,,M,,N,*13";
char const* const BWCformat = "$%*sBWC,%d,%*s,%*s,%*s,%*s,%*s,%s,";

uint32_t utcTime = 0;
char*    degreeTrue = NULL;
int16_t  n = strsepf(msg, BWCformat, &utcTime, &degreeTrue);

TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(81837,      utcTime);    //< Will pass.
TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL_STRING("T", degreeTrue); //< Will pass.
TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL(2,          n);          //< Will pass.

Purpose

Let's say you have to write a C program to tokenize a string that contains a list of tokens separated by a space.

For example this : version: alpha\n. How do you extract information?

Option 1 : You could use sscanf

char in[] = "version: alpha\n";

char versionName[12] = {0};
sscanf(in, "%*s %s\n", versionName);

TEST_ASSERT_EQUAL_STRING("alpha", versionName); //< This will pass.

While this is certainly readable and compact, some problem can be encountered. For example a string bigger than 11 will provoke a buffer overflow. You can read a blog post about the danger of scanf here.

Option 2: You could use sscanf in a safer way

char in[] = "version: alpha\n";
char versionName[12] = {0};

if (sscanf(in, "%*s %11[^\n]%*c", versionName) != 1)
{
    return -1; // We expect exactly 1 conversion
}

While this option more secure, this is less readable and now the buffer size is hardcoded in the format (less maintenable).

Option 3: strtok

strtok is not a good idea.

It uses a static buffer while parsing, so it's not re-entrant (not good for RTOS). It does not correctly handle "empty" fields -- that is, where two delimiters are back-to-back and meant to denote the lack of information in that field.

Option 4: strtok_r

strtok_r is the re-entrant version of strtok.

char in[] = "version: alpha\n";

char *saveptr;
//                     v Note the str here.
char *token = strtok_r(str, " ", &saveptr); //< skip `version: `
if (token == NULL){
    return -1;
}

//                           v Note the NULL here.
char *versionName = strtok_r(NULL, "\n", &saveptr); //< get `alpha`
if (versionName == NULL){
    return -1;
}

This is a good solution, but the interface is less than beautiful and more verbose.

This is especially true if we want to parse number in a string.

Option 5: strsep

strsep is a BSD function. Therefore, there's no guaranty it will be included in string.h.

But it's an alternative to strtok_r with a better interface.

char in[] = "version: alpha\n";

char *str = in;
char *token = strsep(&str, " "); //< skip `version: `
if (token == NULL){
    return -1;
}

char *versionName  = strsep(&str, "\n"); //< get `alpha`
if (versionName == NULL){
    return -1;
}

This is a better solution, but the interface is still quite verbose, especially if we want to extract numbers from a string.

Option 6: using strsepf

Simple usage:

char in[] = "version: alpha\n";

char *versionName = NULL;
strsepf(in, "%*s %s\n", &versionName);
if (versionName == NULL){
    return -1;
}

Before using: Please note that strsepf is an experiment, not a production-ready library.

How to build

This was built with gcc 7.4.0 on WSL.

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

Testing

mkdir buildtests && cd buildtests
cmake .. -DBUILD_TESTING
make
make test

License

MIT License - Copyright (c) 2019 G. Berthiaume
See the LICENCE file for more information.