Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!rufus!corvair.almaden.ibm.com!ebm
From: ebm@corvair.almaden.ibm.com (Eli Messinger)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: scanf() question answered
Message-ID: <273@rufus.UUCP>
Date: 10 Oct 90 20:01:01 GMT
Sender: news@rufus.UUCP
Reply-To: ebm@ibm.com
Organization: Pandora's Box
Lines: 17

To recap:  I'm trying to scan a line of the form ccssss(tab)d, where c are
single characters, s is a >=0 length string, and d is an integer.

The problem is that there seems to be no simple way to make scanf() scan for
a >=0 length string.  If you use %s, then scanf skips blank space, and in the
case where the string is empty, gets the wrong answer.  If you use %[^t] then
an empty string matches 0 characters, which causes the scanf() to halt.

The consensus is: Don't use scanf.  (One solution that was proposed by a few
different people is to scan the line as: %[^\t]%d, then pick the first two
characters off).

	
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