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scanf

The first of the functions we will examine is scanf ("scan formatted"). The scanf function is considered dangerous for a number of reasons. First, if used improperly, it can cause your program to crash by reading character strings that overflow the string variables meant to contain them, just like gets. (See gets.) Second, scanf can hang if it encounters unexpected non-numeric input while reading a line from standard input. Finally, it is difficult to recover from errors when the scanf template string does not match the input exactly.

If you are going to read input from the keyboard, it is far better to read it with getline and parse the resulting string with sscanf ("string scan formatted") than to use scanf directly. However, since sscanf uses nearly the same syntax as sscanf, as does the related fscanf, and since scanf is a standard C function, it is important to learn about it.

If scanf cannot match the template string to the input string, it will return immediately -- and it will leave the first non-matching character as the next character to read from the stream. This is called a matching error, and is the main reason scanf tends to hang when reading input from the keyboard; a second call to scanf will almost certainly choke, since the file position indicator of the stream is not pointing where scanf will expect it to. Normally, scanf returns the number of assignments made to the arguments it was passed, so check the return value to see if scanf found all the items you expected.