How can I read and write comma-delimited text? Ans. Many of today's popular programs use comma-delimited text as a means of transferring data from one program to another, such as the exported data from a spreadsheet program that is to be imported by a database program. Comma-delimited means that all data (with the exception of numeric data) is surrounded by double quotation marks ('') followed by a comma. Numeric data appears as-is, with no surrounding double quotation marks. At the end of each line of text, the comma is omitted and a newline is used. To read and write the text to a file, you would use the fprintf() and fscanf() standard C library functions. The following example shows how a program can write out comma-delimited text and then read it back in. #include #include typedef struct name_str { char first_name[15]; char nick_name[30]; unsigned years_known; } NICKNAME; NICKNAME nick_names[5]; void main(void); void set_name(unsigned, char*, char*, unsigned); void main(void) { FILE* name_file; int x; NICKNAME tmp_name; printf('\nWriting data to NICKNAME.DAT, one moment please...\n'); /* Initialize the data with some values... */ set_name(0, 'Sheryl', 'Basset', 26); set_name(1, 'Joel', 'Elkinator', 1); set_name(2, 'Cliff', 'Shayface', 12); set_name(3, 'Lloyd', 'Lloydage', 28); set_name(4, 'Scott', 'Pie', 9); /* Open the NICKNAME.DAT file for output in text mode. */ name_file = fopen('NICKNAME.DAT', 'wt'); /* Iterate through all the data and use the fprintf() function to write the data to a file. */ for (x=0; x