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Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!nic.MR.NET!shamash!com50!midgard!dal
From: dal@midgard.Midgard.MN.ORG (Dale Schumacher)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: What should [fs]scanf return?
Message-ID: <594@midgard.Midgard.MN.ORG>
Date: 19 Jan 89 17:26:18 GMT
References: <588@forty2.UUCP>
Reply-To: dal@midgard.Midgard.MN.ORG (Dale Schumacher)
Organization: The Midgard Realm, St Paul MN
Lines: 29

The following question appeared in comp.os.minix recently.  I thought
it would get a better/faster answer in comp.lang.c, thus this crossposting.

In article <588@forty2.UUCP> poole@forty2.UUCP (Simon Poole) writes:
|Somehow I've got the feeling that this has been hashed thru before, but
|I probably wasn't paying attention then. Consider the following code
|fragment:
|
|........
|    printf("%d\n",sscanf("123","%d",&dummy));
|    printf("%d\n",sscanf("123","%*d",&dummy));   
|    printf("%d\n",sscanf("123:456","%d:%d",&dummy,&dummy));
|    printf("%d\n",sscanf("123:456","%*d:%*d"));
|........
|
|What should it print?
|
|Minix-ST 1.1     BSD 4.2    I think it should be   
|
|    1             1                1
|    1             -1               0
|    3             2                2
|    3             -1               0
|
|
|K&R first edition says (about scanf):
|
|'It returns as its value the number of sucessfully matched and assigned
| input items'