C Program to Read a Line From a File and Display it

In this example, you will learn to read text from a file and store it in a string until the newline ‘\n’ character is encountered.

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To understand this example, you should have the knowledge of the following C programming topics:

• C File Handling
• C Programming Strings

Program to read text from a file

#include 
#include  // For exit() function
int main() {
    char c[1000];
    FILE *fptr;
    if ((fptr = fopen("program.txt", "r")) == NULL) {
        printf("Error! opening file");
        // Program exits if file pointer returns NULL.
        exit(1);
    }

    // reads text until newline is encountered
    fscanf(fptr, "%[^\n]", c);
    printf("Data from the file:\n%s", c);
    fclose(fptr);

    return 0;
}

If the file is found, the program saves the content of the file to a string c until '\n' newline is encountered.

Suppose the program.txt file contains the following text in the current directory.

C programming is awesome.
I love C programming.
How are you doing? 

The output of the program will be:

Data from the file:
C programming is awesome.

If the file program.txt is not found, this program prints an error message.