strtok() and empty fields

Question

I am serializing some C structure to string and than deserializing it with strtok(). But, unfortunately, strtok() don't detect empty fields (eg 1:2::4).

Is there any alternative function?

Answer 1

You can use strchr (for just one delimiter character) or strcspn (for a group of possible delimiters) to find the next delimiter, process the token, and then just step one character forward. Do this in a loop and you have what you need.

Answer 2

On linux there's strsep.

The strsep() function was introduced as a replacement for strtok(), since the latter cannot handle empty fields. However, strtok() conforms to C89/C99 and hence is more portable.