Smart variadic expansion based on format string

Question

I have a daemon that reads a configuration file in order to know where to write something. In the configuration file, a line like this exists:

output = /tmp/foo/%d/%s/output

Or, it may look like this:

output = /tmp/foo/%s/output/%d

... or simply like this:

output = /tmp/foo/%s/output

... or finally:

output = /tmp/output

I have that line as cfg->pathfmt within my program. What I am trying to do now is to come up with some clever way of using it.

A little more explanation, the path can contain up to two components to be formatted. %d will be expanded as a job ID (int), %s as a job name (string). The user may want to use one, both or none in the configuration file. I need to know what they want and in what order before I finally pass it to snprintf(). I can kind of narrow it down, but I keep wanting to talk to strtok() and that seems ugly.

I want to give users this kind of flexibility, however I'm getting lost looking for a sensible, portable way to implement it. I'm also at a complete and total loss for how to begin searching for this.

I'd be very happy if:

• Someone could help me narrow down the search phrase to find good examples
• Someone could post a link to some OSS project implementing this
• Someone could post some psuedo code

I don't want the code written for me, I'm just really stuck on what (I think) should be something very simple and need some help taking the first bite. I really feel like I'm over thinking and overlooking the obvious.

The end result should be a boolean function like this:

bool output_sugar(const char *fmt, int jobid, const char *jobname, struct job *j);

It would then call snprintf() (sensibly) on j->outpath, returning false if some kind of garbage (i.e. % followed by something not s, d or %) is in the config line (or its null). The sanity checks are easy, I'm just having a bit of a time getting the number (and order) of arguments to format correct.

Thanks in advance. Also, feel free to edit this title if you have the reputation to do so, as I said, I'm not quite sure how to ask the question in a single line.

Answer 1

Using strtok is a error prone. You can treat your variables as a mini language using (fl)lex and yacc. There is simple tutorial here

%{
#include <stdio.h>
%}

%%
%d                      printf("%04d",jobid);
%s                      printf("%s",stripspaces(dirname));
%%

I made an ODBC wrapper that would let you do stuff like dbprintf("insert into blah values %s %D %T %Y", stuff here...); But it was many years ago and I bit it and parsed the format string using strtok.

Answer 2

If the number of options is small and you don't otherwise want/need the extra flexibility and complexity of a parser, you could simply search for each potential replacement substring using strstr().

If you have only the two options, you could tolerably create a four-branched if/else structure (only A, only B, both with A before B, both with B before A) in which to call sprintf() with the correctly ordered arguments. Otherwise, make multiple sprintf() calls, each of which replaces only the first replacement-marker in the format string. (This implies building a list of which replacements are needed and sorting them in appearance-order...)

Answer 3

Yes, you need a parser of some sort. It need not be complex, though:

void format_filename(const char *fmt, int jobid, const char *jobname,
                     char *buffer, size_t buflen)
{
    char *end = buffer + buflen - 1;
    const char *src = fmt;
    char *dst = buffer;
    char c;
    assert(buffer != 0 && fmt != 0 && buflen != 0 && jobname != 0);
    while ((c = *src++) != '\0')
    {
        if (dst >= end)
            err_exit("buffer overflow in %s(): format = %s\n",
                     __func__, fmt);
        else if (c != '%')
            *dst++ = c;
        else if ((c = *src++) == '\0' || c == '%')
        {
            *dst++ = '%';
            if (c == '\0')
                break;
        }
        else if (c == 's')
        {
            size_t len = strlen(jobname);
            if (len > end - dst)
                err_exit("buffer overflow on jobname in %s(): format = %s\n",
                         __func__, fmt);
            else
            {
                strcpy(dst, jobname);
                dst += len;
            }
        }
        else if (c == 'd')
        {
             int nchars = snprintf(dst, end - dst, "%d", jobid);
             if (nchars < 0 || nchars >= end - dst)
                 err_exit("format error on jobid in %s(); format = %s\n",
                          __func__, fmt);
             dst += nchars;
        }
        else
            err_exit("invalid format character %d in %s(): format = %s\n",
                     c, __func__, fmt);
    }
    *dst = '\0';
}

Now tested code. Note that it supports the '%%' notation to allow the user to embed a single '%' in the output. Also, it treats a single '%' at the end of the string as valid and equivalent to '%%'. It calls err_exit() on error; you can choose alternative error strategies as suits your system. I simply assume you have included <assert.h>, <stdio.h> and <string.h> and the header for the err_exit() (variadic) function.

---

Test code...

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
#include <assert.h>

static void err_exit(const char *fmt, ...)
{
    va_list args;
    va_start(args, fmt);
    vfprintf(stderr, fmt, args);
    va_end(args);
    exit(1);
}

... then format_filename() as above, then ...

#define DIM(x) (sizeof(x)/sizeof(*(x)))

static const char *format[] =
{
    "/tmp/%d/name/%s",
    "/tmp/%s/number/%d",
    "/tmp/%s.%d%%",
    "/tmp/%",
};

int main(void)
{
    char buffer[64];
    size_t i;

    for (i = 0; i < DIM(format); i++)
    {
        format_filename(format[i], 1234, "job-name", buffer, sizeof(buffer));
        printf("fmt = %-20s; name = %s\n", format[i], buffer);
    }

    return(0);
}