70.C Program to Read a Line From a File and Display it

C Program to Read a Line From a File and Display it

This program reads text from a file and stores it in a string until enter 'newline' character is encountered.

To understand this example, you should have the knowledge of following C programming topics:

• C Programming Files I/O
• C Programming Strings

Example: Program to read text from a file

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h> // For exit() function
int main()
{
    char c[1000];
    FILE *fptr;

    if ((fptr = fopen("program.txt", "r")) == NULL)
    {
        printf("Error! opening file");
        // Program exits if file pointer returns NULL.
        exit(1);         
    }

    // reads text until newline 
    fscanf(fptr,"%[^\n]", c);

    printf("Data from the file:\n%s", c);
    fclose(fptr);
    
    return 0;
}

If the file program.txt is not found, this program prints error message.

If the file is found, the program saves the content of the file to a string c until '\n' newline is encountered.

Suppose, the program.txt file contains following text.

C programming is awesome.
I love C programming.
How are you doing?

The output of the program will be:

Data from the file: C programming is awesome.

Check out these related examples:

• C Program to Write a Sentence to a File
• C Program to Display its own Source Code as Output
• C "Hello, World!" Program