Question

I am confused about scanf’s behaviour in the following program. scanf appears to input once, and then not input again, until a stream of characters is printed.

Below in a C program

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
    int i, j=0;

    do
    {
        ++j;
        scanf("%d", &i);
        printf("\n\n%d %d\n\n", i, j);
    }
    while((i!=8) && (j<10));  

    printf("\nJ = %d\n", j);
    return 0;
}

here, Till i am inputting any integer program works perfectly fine, but when a character is inputted it goes on printing the last inputed value of i and never stops(untill j is 10 when loop exits) for scanf to take next input.

output::  
1    <-----1st input
1 1
2    <---- 2nd input
2 2
a    <---- character input
2 3  
2 4
2 5
2 6
2 7
2 8
2 9
2 10

J = 10  

same thing is happening in c++ also.

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
    int i, j=0;

    do
    {
        ++j;
        cin>>i;
        cout<<i<<" "<<j<<"\n";
    }
    while((i!=8) && (j<10));

    cout<<"\nj = "<<j<<"\n";
}   


output of c++ program ::  
1     <-----1st input
1 1
2     <-----2nd input
2 2
a    <------ character input
0 3
0 4
0 5
0 6
0 7
0 8
0 9
0 10

j = 10  

only change in c++ is that 0 is being printed instead of last value.

I know here integer values are expected by the program, but i want to know what happens when character is inputted in place of an integer?
what is the reason of all happening above?

Answer 1

When you enter a, then cin >> i fails to read it because the type of i is int to which a character cannot be read. That means, a remains in the stream forever.

Now why i prints 0 is a different story. Actually it can print anything. The content of i is not defined once the attempt to read fails. Similar thing happens with scanf as well.

The proper way to write it this:

do
{
    ++j;
    if (!(cin>>i)) 
    {
       //handle error, maybe you want to break the loop here?
    }
    cout<<i<<" "<<j<<"\n";
}
while((i!=8) && (j<10));

Or simply this (if you want to exit loop if error occurs):

int i = 0, j = 0;
while((i!=8) && (j<10) && ( cin >> i) )
{
    ++j;
    cout<<i<<" "<<j<<"\n";
}