Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!shelby!csli!poser
From: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Problems with scanf()
Message-ID: <16070@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 27 Oct 90 20:26:29 GMT
References: <1990Oct12.154156.25096@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <1990Oct20.001637.28244@unislc.uucp> <324@brat.UUCP>
Reply-To: poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser)
Distribution: na
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 8

I don't see why it is necessary to worry about scanf(). It is safe to use
directly only when you are quite sure of the input format, which is not
very often. But you can use its parsing facilities safely by reading
input using a safe getline function (I often use one that strips
comments and allows quoting of newlines in place of one that merely
counts input characters to prevent overflowing the buffer) and then
using sscanf(). Except for one-shot programs I suggest avoiding fscanf()
altogether and using sscanf plus a safe input function.