Reading a string with spaces with sscanf

Question

For a project I m trying to read an int and a string from a string  The only problem is sscanf   appears to break reading an  s when it sees a space  Is there anyway to get around this limitation  Here s an example of what I m trying to do   include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt stdlib h gt   int main int argc  char   argv        int age      char  buffer      buffer   malloc 200   sizeof char        sscanf  quot 19 cool kid quot    quot  d  s quot    amp age  buffer        printf  quot  s is  d years old n quot   buffer  age       return 0     What it prints is  cool is 19 years old where I need cool kid is 19 years old  Does anyone know how to fix this

User · Answer

You want the  c conversion specifier  which just reads a sequence of characters without special handling for whitespace   Note that you need to fill the buffer with zeroes first  because the  c specifier doesn t write a nul-terminator   You also need to specify the number of characters to read  otherwise it defaults to only 1    memset buffer  0  200   sscanf  19 cool kid     d  199c    amp age  buffer

User · Answer

The following line will start reading a number   d  followed by anything different from tabs or newlines      t n     sscanf  19 cool kid     d     t n     amp age  buffer

User · Answer

Since you want the trailing string from the input  you can use  n  number of characters consumed thus far  to get the position at which the trailing string starts   This avoids memory copies and buffer sizing issues  but comes at the cost that you may need to do them explicitly if you wanted a copy   const char  input    19  cool kid   int age  int nameStart   0  sscanf input    d  n    amp age   amp nameStart   printf   s is  d years old n   input   nameStart  age     outputs   cool kid is 19 years old

User · Answer

If you want to scan to the end of the string  stripping out a newline if there   just use   char  x    19 cool kid   sscanf  x    d     n     amp age  buffer     That s because  s only matches non-whitespace characters and will stop on the first whitespace it finds  The     n  format specifier will match every character that s not  because of    in the selection given  which is a newline   In other words  it will match any other character     Keep in mind that you should have allocated enough space in your buffer to take the string since you cannot be sure how much will be read  a good reason to stay away from scanf fscanf unless you use specific field widths    You could do that with   char  x    19 cool kid   char  buffer   malloc  strlen  x    1   sscanf  x    d     n     amp age  buffer      you don t need   sizeof char  since that s always 1 by definition

User · Answer

I guess this is what you want  it does exactly what you specified    include lt stdio h gt   include lt stdlib h gt   int main int argc  char   argv        int age      char  buffer      buffer   malloc 200   sizeof char        sscanf  19 cool kid     d cool  s    amp age  buffer       printf  cool  s is  d years old n   buffer  age       return 0      The format expects  first a number  and puts it at where  amp age points to   then whitespace  zero or more   then the literal string  cool   then whitespace  zero or more  again  and then finally a string  and put that at whatever buffer points to   You forgot the  cool  part in your format string  so the format then just assumes that is the string you were wanting to assign to buffer  But you don t want to assign that string  only skip it   Alternative  you could also have a format string like    d  s  s   but then you must assign another buffer for it  with a different name   and print it as    s  s is  d years old n

[c] Reading a string with spaces with sscanf

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