NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/comp/os/msdos/programm/8059

Text File | 1992-07-25 | 1.6 KB | 37 lines

Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Path: sparky!uunet!destroyer!ubc-cs!unixg.ubc.ca!penguin!danc
From: [e-mail] (Dan Ciarniello)
Subject: Re: Borland C++ 3.0 scanf()/gets() 'bug'.
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: danc@penguin (Dan Ciarniello)
Nntp-Posting-Host: penguin.geog.ubc.ca
Organization: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 20:22:51 GMT
Lines: 24

To all those who responded to my problem with scanf and gets:  Thanks for the help.

The most frequent answer was to use scanf("%s\n", var) instead of scanf("%s", var)
the theory being that this forces scanf to read (and discard) the newline character
that's still in the input stream.  This seems to agree with the description of how
scanf works that is in the Borland manuals.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work as advertised.  Instead, scanf waits for more input.
This input is then left in the input stream for the next function that reads the
input stream.  In essence, the problem is the same as before.  I have verified this
with Borland C++, System V cc and AIX xlc.

The solution was provided by Jim Van Zandt:  use gets and sscanf.
(This is also mentioned in the manual under scanf but I missed/ignored this advice
the first ten times I read it)
Ie:

     gets(strvar);
     sscanf(strvar, "%s", var);

sscanf works similarly to scanf except that it takes input from strvar rather than
stdin.  This combination works with all three of the above mentioned compilers.

Dan.