Reading from files in C - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Reading from files

📖 Scenario: You are creating a simple program to read a list of names from a text file and display them on the screen. This is like opening a guest list and showing each guest's name one by one.

🎯 Goal: Build a C program that opens a file called names.txt, reads each line (each name), and prints all the names to the screen.

📋 What You'll Learn

Open the file names.txt for reading

Read each line from the file using fgets

Print each name to the screen

Close the file after reading

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Reading from files is a common task in many programs, such as loading user data, configuration settings, or lists of items.

💼 Career

Understanding file input/output is essential for software developers, especially when working with data files, logs, or user inputs stored in files.

1

Create a file pointer and open the file

Write a line of code to create a file pointer called file and open the file "names.txt" in read mode using fopen.

C

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use FILE *file = fopen("names.txt", "r"); to open the file for reading.

2

Create a buffer to hold each line

Add a character array called line with size 100 to store each line read from the file.

C

#include 

FILE *file = fopen("names.txt", "r");

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Declare char line[100]; to hold each name line.

3

Read each line from the file using fgets

Write a while loop that uses fgets(line, 100, file) to read each line until the end of the file.

C

#include 

FILE *file = fopen("names.txt", "r");
char line[100];

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use while (fgets(line, 100, file)) to read lines until no more lines are left.

4

Print each line and close the file

Inside the while loop, write printf("%s", line); to print each name. After the loop, close the file using fclose(file);.

C

#include 

FILE *file = fopen("names.txt", "r");
char line[100];

while (fgets(line, 100, file)) {
    // Your code here
}

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use printf("%s", line); inside the loop and fclose(file); after the loop.