Question

Basically I have a C program where the user inputs a number (eg. 4). What that is defining is the number of integers that will go into an array (maximum of 10). However I want the user to be able to input them as “1 5 2 6” (for example). I.e. as a white space delimited list.

So far:

#include<stdio.h>;

int main()
{
    int no, *noArray[10];    
    printf("Enter no. of variables for array");
    scanf("%d", &no);

    printf("Enter the %d values of the array", no);
    //this is where I want the scanf to be generated automatically. eg:
    scanf("%d %d %d %d", noArray[0], noArray[1], noArray[2], noArray[3]);

    return 0; 
}

Not sure how I might do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

scanf automatically consumes any whitespace that comes before the format specifier/percentage sign (except in the case of %c, which consumes one character at a time, including whitespace). This means that a line like:

scanf("%d", &no);

actually reads and ignores all the whitespace before the integer you want to read. So you can easily read an arbitrary number of integers separated by whitespace using a for loop:

for(int i = 0; i < no; i++) {
  scanf("%d", &noArray[i]);
}

Note that noArray should be an array of ints and you need to pass the address of each element to scanf, as mentioned above. Also you shouldn’t have a semicolon after your #include statement. The compiler should give you a warning if not an error for that.