Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!munnari!murdu!strasser
From: strasser@murdu.OZ (Mike Strasser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: LSC 3.0 scanf deletes
Keywords: delete, scanf
Message-ID: <1421@murdu.OZ>
Date: 4 Aug 88 00:10:35 GMT
References: <2559@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <587@helios.ee.lbl.gov>
Reply-To: strasser@murdu.UUCP (Mike Strasser)
Organization: Forestry Section, University of Melbourne
Lines: 26

In article <587@helios.ee.lbl.gov> beard@ux1.lbl.gov (Patrick C Beard) writes:

[quote from Paul Dietz]

>The answer to your question is, DON'T USE SCANF!  I have always hated
>the way scanf treats the user who assumes he can edit his command line.
>A better approach to getting lines of input and parsing them from the user
>is to use gets() and then sscanf().  For example:

[etc.]

The problem with doing your own buffering via gets(), strings and
sscanf() is when you want a flexible interface where a user can type
more than one item on a line.  You then need to parse the line yourself
(when scanf() on an input stream will do that adequately) or find a way
of knowing how much of the string has been parsed by sscanf(), so second
and subsequent calls will not start at the beginning of the string again.

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Mike Strasser                ACSnet, CSnet:  strasser@murdu.oz
                             Internet:       strasser%murdu.oz@uunet.uu.net
Forestry Section
University of Melbourne
Creswick, Victoria.  3363    Phone: (053) 45 2405
A u s t r a l i a                   +61 53 45 2405
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