Question

I am not able to flush stdin here, is there a way to flush it? If not then how to make getchar() to take a character as input from user, instead of a “\n” left by scanf() in the input buffer??

#include "stdio.h"
#include "stdlib.h"

int main(int argc,char*argv[]) {
    FILE *fp;
    char another='y';
    struct emp {
        char name[40];
        int age;
        float bs;
    };
    struct emp e;
    if(argc!=2) {
        printf("please write 1 target file name\n");
    }
    fp=fopen(argv[1],"wb");
    if(fp==NULL) {
        puts("cannot open file");
        exit(1);
    }
    while(another=='y') {
        printf("\nEnter name,age and basic salary");
        scanf("%s %d %f",e.name,&e.age,&e.bs);
        fwrite(&e,sizeof(e),1,fp);

        printf("Add another record (Y/N)");
        fflush(stdin);
        another=getchar();
    }
    fclose(fp);
    return 0;
}

EDIT: updated code, still not working properly

#include "stdio.h"
#include "stdlib.h"

int main(int argc,char*argv[]) {
    FILE *fp;
    char another='y';
    struct emp {
        char name[40];
        int age;
        float bs;
    };
    struct emp e;
    unsigned int const BUF_SIZE = 1024;
    char buf[BUF_SIZE];

    if(argc!=2) {
        printf("please write 1 target file name\n");
    }
    fp=fopen(argv[1],"wb");
    if(fp==NULL) {
        puts("cannot open file");
        exit(1);
    }
    while(another=='y') {
        printf("\nEnter name,age and basic salary : ");
        fgets(buf, BUF_SIZE, stdin);
        sscanf(buf, "%s %d %f", e.name, &e.age, &e.bs);
        fwrite(&e,sizeof(e),1,fp);
        printf("Add another record (Y/N)");
        another=getchar();
    }
    fclose(fp);
    return 0;
}

Output:

dev@dev-laptop:~/Documents/c++_prac/google_int_prac$ ./a.out emp.dat

Enter name,age and basic salary : deovrat 45 23
Add another record (Y/N)y

Enter name,age and basic salary : Add another record (Y/N)y

Enter name,age and basic salary : Add another record (Y/N)

Answer 1

Update: You need to add another getchar() at the end of your loop to consume the ‘\n’ that follows the Y/N. I don’t think this is the best way to go, but it will make your code work as it stands now.

while(another=='y') {
    printf("\nEnter name,age and basic salary : ");
    fgets(buf, BUF_SIZE, stdin);
    sscanf(buf, "%s %d %f", e.name, &e.age, &e.bs);
    fwrite(&e,sizeof(e),1,fp);
    printf("Add another record (Y/N)");
    another=getchar();
    getchar();
}

I would suggest reading the data you want to parse (up to and including the ‘\n’) into a buffer and then parse it out using sscanf(). This way you consume the newline and you can perform other sanity checks on the data.