GoldenEye | CQRS flavoured framework that will speed up your WebAPI | Microservice library

I would suggest another approach:

I found two potential problems in the __init__ function given your codebase and the .dat file:

No you can never approach that kind of pretty formatting using tabs merely.

Sticking to printf, you could use %*s format that specifies space occupation. It requires an extra number argument before the string. A positive number means right-aligned, and negative number means left-aligned. For example:

The problem is that %s format specifier stops scanning whenever a whitespece char (a space, a tabulation, a newline and so on) is found.

That's why both "Toy Story" and "Four Rooms" are stored in two different fields of your struct, making your scanning literally "shift" positions (the genre field of the first movie will become the first field of the second movie and so on).

Instead of using %s you could use %[^\t].

Square brackets format specifier scans a string containing a set of characters. But in case the ^ is present the character contained is avoided. So in this case it means "store the string and stop when the first tab is found".

Even better: you can choose to store at most N characters by using the format %N[^\t]. Given the size of your destination array, just specify N as this size minus one (leaving the space for the string terminator).

Your fscanf will become something like: