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I'm trying to make some sort of simple console text editor program to get better with C. I'm having trouble with what I thought would be a somewhat simple task:

How do I get each line from my char* buffer, which contains all of my text, so I can output each line, including empty lines, with the correct line number in front of it.

I tried several different ways already, but none have stuck. I tried strtok(), which is what is currently pushed to my repo, and it ignores whitespace. I tried strchr() but did not have the slightest idea how that function worked and got an infinite loop. I tried doing my own function to create an array of lines but that lead to a segmentation fault which was not fixed by mallocing the array. I am at a loss here, I'm not sure what I can do.

Here is the repo: https://codeberg.org/Mister_Bones/txt-ed

Here is the offending code:

// Print contents of file
int print_file(char* buffer) {
	// Print a new line
	printf("\n");

	// Print each line with line number
	// Set first line
	int line_num = 1;

	// Get individual line from buffer
	char* line = strtok(buffer, "\n");

	// Loop through and print lines
	// TODO: Don't ignore whitespace
	while (line != NULL) {
		printf("%4d\t%s\n", line_num, line);
		line = strtok(NULL, "\n");
		line_num++;
	}

	return 0;
}
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[-] dr_robotBones@reddthat.com 1 points 1 week ago

I am on Linux as well, it does work but it skips empty lines which will make the line numbers inaccurate.

this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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