C++ reference: cstdio: getc

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getc
<stdio.h>

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int getc (FILE * stream);

Get the next character.
Returns the next character of the stream and increases the file pointer to point to the next character.
This routine is normally implemented as a macro with the same result as fgetc().

Parameters.

stream: pointer to an open file.

Return Value.
The character read is returned as an int value.
If the End Of File has been reached or there has been an error reading, the function returns EOF. You can use ferror() or feof() to determine whether an error happened or the End-Of-File was reached.

Portability.
Defined in ANSI-C.

Example.

/* getc example: money counter */
#include <stdio.h>

int main ()
{
  FILE * pFile;
  char c;
  int n = 0;

  pFile = fopen("myfile.txt","r");
  if (pFile==NULL) perror ("Error opening file");
  else
  {
    do {
      c = getc (pFile);
      if (c == '$') n++;
      } while (c != EOF);
    fclose (pFile);
    printf ("File contains %d dollar characters.\n",n);
  }
  return 0;
}

This program reads myfile.txt character by character and uses the n variable to count how many dollar characters ($) does it contain.

See also.
fputc, fread, fwrite