[c] How to read string from keyboard using C?

I want to read a string entered by the user. I don't know the length of the string. As there are no strings in C I declared a pointer:

char * word;

and used scanf to read input from the keyboard:

scanf("%s" , word) ;

but I got a segmentation fault.

How can I read input from the keyboard in C when the length is unknown ?

I cannot see why there is a recommendation to use scanf() here. scanf() is safe only if you add restriction parameters to the format string - such as %64s or so.

A much better way is to use char * fgets ( char * str, int num, FILE * stream );.

int main()
{
    char data[64];
    if (fgets(data, sizeof data, stdin)) {
        // input has worked, do something with data
    }
}

(untested)

The following code can be used to read the input string from a user. But it's space is limited to 64.

char word[64] = { '\0' };  //initialize all elements with '\0'
int i = 0;
while ((word[i] != '\n')&& (i<64))
{
    scanf_s("%c", &word[i++], 1);
}

When reading input from any file (stdin included) where you do not know the length, it is often better to use getline rather than scanf or fgets because getline will handle memory allocation for your string automatically so long as you provide a null pointer to receive the string entered. This example will illustrate:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main (int argc, char *argv[]) {

    char *line = NULL;  /* forces getline to allocate with malloc */
    size_t len = 0;     /* ignored when line = NULL */
    ssize_t read;

    printf ("\nEnter string below [ctrl + d] to quit\n");

    while ((read = getline(&line, &len, stdin)) != -1) {

        if (read > 0)
            printf ("\n  read %zd chars from stdin, allocated %zd bytes for line : %s\n", read, len, line);

        printf ("Enter string below [ctrl + d] to quit\n");
    }

    free (line);  /* free memory allocated by getline */

    return 0;
}

The relevant parts being:

char *line = NULL;  /* forces getline to allocate with malloc */
size_t len = 0;     /* ignored when line = NULL */
/* snip */
read = getline (&line, &len, stdin);

Setting line to NULL causes getline to allocate memory automatically. Example output:

$ ./getline_example

Enter string below [ctrl + d] to quit
A short string to test getline!

  read 32 chars from stdin, allocated 120 bytes for line : A short string to test getline!

Enter string below [ctrl + d] to quit
A little bit longer string to show that getline will allocated again without resetting line = NULL

  read 99 chars from stdin, allocated 120 bytes for line : A little bit longer string to show that getline will allocated again without resetting line = NULL

Enter string below [ctrl + d] to quit

So with getline you do not need to guess how long your user's string will be.

#include<stdio.h>

int main()
{
    char str[100];
    scanf("%[^\n]s",str);
    printf("%s",str);
    return 0;
}

input: read the string
ouput: print the string

This code prints the string with gaps as shown above.

You need to have the pointer to point somewhere to use it.

Try this code:

char word[64];
scanf("%s", word);

This creates a character array of lenth 64 and reads input to it. Note that if the input is longer than 64 bytes the word array overflows and your program becomes unreliable.

As Jens pointed out, it would be better to not use scanf for reading strings. This would be safe solution.

char word[64]
fgets(word, 63, stdin);
word[63] = 0;