Question

I can’t get around this problem. I need the user to type a string then hit enter, then another string. When he/she is done hit enter once more (this last string would only have \n character so I know when to stop).

char * buff = malloc (100);

 printf("Type in strings, to finish hit enter\n");

 do{
       scanf (" %[^\n]",buff);
       //do some other stuff with the string
  } while(*buff);            

  printf("You have finished typing strings\n");

This approach I came up with is no use for me, since the [^\n] command is telling the function to read everything but the \n meaning that the \n is kept in the console buffer. If I simply do

while(*buff)
  {
      scanf ("%s",buff);
  }

if I hit enter it does nothing.
Any other approach?

Answer 1

Yeah, scanf is actually looking for characters. What you want is gets (to get a line).

[edit] as pointed out by Daniel Fischer:

gets has (at last) been removed from the language. Even before, the
man page has for a long time said Never use gets()

Looks like my advice was not the best. I guess this means use fgets, as it protects against buffer overrun. Unlike gets, the newline character(s) will also be stored in the string and it is the programmer’s responsibility to check for them.

const size_t bufsize = 100;
char buf[bufsize];

while( fgets(buf, bufsize, stdin) != NULL )
{
    if( buf[0] == '\n' ) break;

    /* Do something with your string... */
}