macOS reading variable length lines from a file

[farmerdoug]

Lines in my files are not of the same length. However the date is always first.
For a while

fscanf(file, "%s %s \n", date, therest);

worked in that everything past the date was dumped into therest. I don't know what I did but it doesn't work anymore.

How do I read the first element of every line, independent of what follows?

 

[chown33]

fgets() to read the line into a buffer.
Check for EOF, errors, incomplete lines, etc.
sscanf() to parse the data from the line buffer.

 

[farmerdoug]

Thanks.