Get Next Line

The Get Next Line project is a challenge within the 42 School curriculum aimed at deepening students' understanding of file I/O, dynamic memory allocation, and efficient handling of buffer management in C. The goal is to create a function that reads a line from a file descriptor, returning it one line at a time, regardless of how the lines are separated.

Task

The task was to implement the get_next_line function, which reads and returns the next line from a file descriptor. The function needs to handle edge cases such as:

• Reading from files, standard input, or other file descriptors.
• Managing dynamic memory allocation to accommodate lines of varying lengths.
• Handling different buffer sizes and ensuring that all scenarios are managed efficiently without memory leaks.

Key objectives included:

• Designing a function that returns a line of text terminated by a newline character (\n), the end of the file (EOF), or an error.
• Ensuring the function handles multiple file descriptors simultaneously, maintaining the state of each descriptor separately.
• Implementing efficient memory management to avoid memory leaks and ensure that the function performs well even with large files or varying buffer sizes.

Key Achievements

• Efficient Multi-Descriptor Management: Successfully implemented the get_next_line function to handle multiple file descriptors concurrently, ensuring accurate and efficient state management for each descriptor.
• Optimized Memory and Buffer Management: Developed a dynamic memory allocation strategy and efficient buffer handling, ensuring performance and reliability across different input scenarios, including large files and varying buffer sizes.
• Robust and Modular Code: Created a modular and reusable codebase with comprehensive error handling, making the function stable, maintainable, and adaptable for future projects.

Installation

To install the Project, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository: git clone git@github.com:jakobsitory/01_get_next_line_42CC.git
2. Navigate to the project directory: 01_get_next_line_42CC
3. Build the project: make

Usage

1. Install francinette to test the function: https://github.com/xicodomingues/francinette"
2. Open project directory and run `francinette' to run extensive tests