title: Parsing a file in C
body: <p>I need parse through a file and do some processing into it. The file is a text file and the data is a variable length data of the form "PP1004181350D001002003..........". So there will be timestamps if there is PP so 1004181350 is 2010-04-18 13:50. The ones where there are D are the data points that are three separate data each three digits long, so D001002003 has three coordonates of 001, 002 and 003.</p>
  
  <p>Now I need to parse this data from a file for which I need to store each timestamp into a array and the corresponding datas into arrays that has as many rows as the number of data and three rows for each co-ordinate. The end array might be like</p>
  
  <pre><code>TimeStamp[1] = "135000", low[1] = "001", medium[1] = "002", high[1] = "003"
  TimeStamp[2] = "135015", low[2] = "010", medium[2] = "012", high[2] = "013"
  TimeStamp[3] = "135030", low[3] = "051", medium[3] = "052", high[3] = "043"
  ....
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The question is how do I go about doing this in C? How do I go through this string looking for these patterns and storing the values in the corresponding arrays for further processing?</p>
  
  <p>Note: Here the seconds value in timestamp is added on our own as it is known at each data comes after 15 seconds.</p>