I need to read a line of text (terminated by a newline) without making assumptions about the length. So I now face to possibilities:

  • Use fgets and check each time if the last character is a newline and continuously append to a buffer
  • Read each character using fgetc and occasionally realloc the buffer

Intuition tells me the fgetc variant might be slower, but then again I don't see how fgets can do it without examining every character (also my intuition isn't always that good). The lines are quite large so the performance is important.

I would like to know the pros and cons of each approach. Thank you in advance.

c io stdio fgets fgetc
Edit
Report