How do you read a word in C

[Guest]

Let's say I want to read a word. The word is read after I hit ENTER.

[Guest]

Just now, Nicholatian said:

You need to be more specific. What do you mean by “word”? This has many differen definitions depending on context, especially in computer science.

Sorry. Basically a word with more than 1 character. Like ilikeblue

[2FA]

scanf()

[Guest]

Just now, DeadEyePsycho said:

scanf()

oh no way. no it only scans single character, i thought about arrays or smoething like that

[2FA]

4 minutes ago, deXxterlab97 said:

oh no way. no it only scans single character, i thought about arrays or smoething like that

char stringarray[256];

scanf(%s , stringarray);

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

char stringarray[256]

scanf(%s , stringarray)

yeah but then

format ‘%s’ expects argument of type ‘char *’, but argument 2 has type ‘char (*)[256]’ [-Wformat=]

 

[2FA]

4 minutes ago, deXxterlab97 said:

yeah but then

format ‘%s’ expects argument of type ‘char *’, but argument 2 has type ‘char (*)[256]’ [-Wformat=]

 

May I see what you put for the scanf and array?

 

Edit: I durred and forgot some things I think

 

scanf("%s", stringarray);

 

or

 

scanf("%s", &stringarray);

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

May I see what you put for the scanf and array?

 

Edit: I durred and forgot some things I think

 

scanf("%s", stringarray);

 

or

 

scanf("%s", &stringarray);

ok nvm thanks, i get used to putting & symbol when scanning

[2FA]

Just now, deXxterlab97 said:

ok nvm thanks, i get used to putting & symbol when scanning

Sometimes you need to though, particularly when working with multiple functions and you're using pointers.

 

stringarray is equivalent to stringarray[0].

 

&stringarray is passing a pointer.

[Unimportant]

13 hours ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

stringarray is equivalent to stringarray[0].

 

&stringarray is passing a pointer.

Whoa there, it's a little more complicated then that...

 

stringarray decays into a pointer pointing to the first element of the array, stringarray[0] IS the first element in the array, 2 very diffirent things:

char stringarray[] = "Foo";

//stringarray decays into a pointer pointing to the first element, thus:
stringarray == &stringarray[0]

//However:
sizeof(stringarray) != sizeof(&stringarray[0])
  
//The first returns the size of the entire array, the latter returns the 
//size of a char* pointer.
  

There is also a difference between stringarray and &stringarray:

//stringarray and &stringarray both point to the first element in the array, thus:
stringarray == &stringarray
  
//but, they are of diffirent types, thus:
(stringarray + 1) != (&stringarray + 1)
  
//Because stringarray is of type char* and &stringarray is of type 
//char (*)[4]

 

[Unimportant]

5 hours ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

char stringarray[256];

scanf(%s , stringarray);

scanf is widely considered not safe, as there is  no way to guard against buffer overflow when the user enters more characters then the length of the array. Common practice is to use fgets on stdin, which allows to pass a maximum amount of characters to read:

char stringarray[256];

fgets(stringarray, 256, stdin);

And simply extract the first word manually, ignoring the rest, this could be easily done by searching the string and replacing the first space with a 0, effectively truncating the string after the first word.