Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Substitute for gets()
Message-ID: <11748@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Date: 13 Feb 89 19:29:35 GMT
References: <721@hscfvax.harvard.edu> <722@hscfvax.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 16

In article <722@hscfvax.harvard.edu> xmjschm@hscfvax.UUCP (R00100@MJSchmelzer) writes:
>One final question: No one mentioned scanf("%255s", buffer) [as a gets()
>replacement].  This _does_ seem wrong to me, but I can't quite pin it down.
>Comments?

I guess my mail didn't get through.  %s is wrong because it scans a token
rather than a line, but I did mention
	scanf("%254[^\n]%*c", buffer)
as a possible solution.  (I used 254 since you said the buffer was char[255],
and we need one byte for the trailing \0.)  This no longer crashes on long
lines, but it still fails to detect them.  (This could be fixed via
	char ch;
	if (scanf("%254[^\n]%c", buffer, &ch) != 2 || ch != '\n') error();
, but fgets() seems cleaner.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint