How does strtok() split the string into tokens in C?

Question

Please explain to me the working of strtok() function. The manual says it breaks the string into tokens. I am unable to understand from the manual what it actually does.

I added watches on str and *pch to check its working when the first while loop occurred, the contents of str were only "this". How did the output shown below printed on the screen?

/* strtok example */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main ()
{
  char str[] ="- This, a sample string.";
  char * pch;
  printf ("Splitting string \"%s\" into tokens:\n",str);
  pch = strtok (str," ,.-");
  while (pch != NULL)
  {
    printf ("%s\n",pch);
    pch = strtok (NULL, " ,.-");
  }
  return 0;
}

Output:

Splitting string "- This, a sample string." into tokens:
This
a
sample
string

Answer 1

the strtok runtime function works like this

the first time you call strtok you provide a string that you want to tokenize

char s[] = "this is a string";

in the above string space seems to be a good delimiter between words so lets use that:

char* p = strtok(s, " ");

what happens now is that 's' is searched until the space character is found, the first token is returned ('this') and p points to that token (string)

in order to get next token and to continue with the same string NULL is passed as first argument since strtok maintains a static pointer to your previous passed string:

p = strtok(NULL," ");

p now points to 'is'

and so on until no more spaces can be found, then the last string is returned as the last token 'string'.

more conveniently you could write it like this instead to print out all tokens:

for (char *p = strtok(s," "); p != NULL; p = strtok(NULL, " "))
{
  puts(p);
}

EDIT:

If you want to store the returned values from strtok you need to copy the token to another buffer e.g. strdup(p); since the original string (pointed to by the static pointer inside strtok) is modified between iterations in order to return the token.