strspn and strcspn

suggest change

Given a string, strspn calculates the length of the initial substring (span) consisting solely of a specific list of characters. strcspn is similar, except it calculates the length of the initial substring consisting of any characters except those listed:

/*
  Provided a string of "tokens" delimited by "separators", print the tokens along
  with the token separators that get skipped.
*/
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void)
{
    const char sepchars[] = ",.;!?";
    char foo[] = ";ball call,.fall gall hall!?.,";
    char *s;
    int n;

    for (s = foo; *s != 0; /*empty*/) {
        /* Get the number of token separator characters. */
        n = (int)strspn(s, sepchars);

        if (n > 0)
            printf("skipping separators: << %.*s >> (length=%d)\n", n, s, n);

        /* Actually skip the separators now. */
        s += n;

        /* Get the number of token (non-separator) characters. */
        n = (int)strcspn(s, sepchars);

        if (n > 0)
            printf("token found: << %.*s >> (length=%d)\n", n, s, n);

        /* Skip the token now. */
        s += n;
    }

    printf("== token list exhausted ==\n");

    return 0;
}

Analogous functions using wide-character strings are wcsspn and wcscspn; they're used the same way.

Found a mistake? Have a question or improvement idea? Let me know.

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