get the last token of a string in C

c tokenize strtok
Jack picture Jack · Sep 28, 2015 · Viewed 14.2k times · Source

what I want to do is given an input string, which I will not know it's size or the number of tokens, be able to print it's last token.

e.x.: 

char* s = "some/very/big/string";
char* token;

const char delimiter[2] = "/";

token = strtok(s, delimiter);

while (token != NULL) {
    printf("%s\n", token);
    token = strtok(NULL, delimiter);
}

return token;

and i want my return to be

string

but I what I get is (null). Any workarounds? I've searched the web and can't seem to find an answer to this. At least for C programming language.

Answer

Sergey Kalinichenko picture Sergey Kalinichenko · Sep 28, 2015

If you tokenize on a specific character, i.e. '/' in your example, you do not need to tokenize the string at all: call strrchr to find the position of the last '/', and add 1 to the resultant pointer to skip the delimiter, like this:

char *s = "some/very/big/string";
char *last = strrchr(s, '/');
if (last != NULL) {
    printf("Last token: '%s'\n", last+1);
}

Demo.

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