The strsep function locates in stringp, the first occurrence of any character in delim (or the terminating '\0' character) and replaces it with a '\0'. The location of the next character after the delimiter character (or NULL, if the end of the string is reached) is stored in the stringp argument. The original value of the stringp argument is returned. You can detect an "empty" field; one caused by two adjacent delimiter characters, by comparing the location referenced by the pointer returned in the stringp argument to '\0'. The stringp argument is initially NULL, strsep returns NULL.