Navigating Text File Lines in C

When working with text files using C , you may encounter the need to jump to a specific line. While there's no direct method provided by C for this purpose, you can achieve it by looping through the file until you reach the desired line.

Looping to Specific Line

The solution involves using a loop to count lines until you reach the target line number. This technique is demonstrated in the code snippet below:

#include 
#include 

std::fstream& GotoLine(std::fstream& file, unsigned int num){
    file.seekg(std::ios::beg);
    for(int i=0; i ::max(),'\n');
    }
    return file;
}

The GotoLine function sets the seek pointer of the file stream to the beginning of the specified num line.

Testing the Code

To illustrate this technique, consider a text file with the following content:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

The following test program demonstrates how to jump to line 8 and read the contents:

int main(){
    using namespace std;
    fstream file("bla.txt");

    GotoLine(file, 8);

    string line8;
    file >> line8;

    cout 
Output:
8
By implementing the looping approach, you can easily navigate to any specific line in a text file and access its contents in C  .