Question

I know you can use scanf and get a character to use in an if clause, however, is there a way to do this with a string?

e.g.

printf("enter 'foo' to do 'bar', otherwise enter 'hay' to do 'wire');
scanf("%string", &stringNAME); //this is the part where I have no idea what to do

if (stringNAME == 'foo'){do bar} //here, issues occur with multicharacter character :/
if (stringNAME == 'hay'){do wire}

Answer 1

You’ve almost got it, just a few tweaks.

char stringNAME[10];
printf("enter 'foo' to do 'bar', otherwise enter 'hay' to do 'wire');
scanf("%9s", stringNAME); 

if (!strcmp(stringNAME,"foo"){do bar}
if (!strcmp(stringNAME,"hay")){do wire}

Note the number in the scanf, the 9. That should be one less (Or smaller) than the size of your input string. Otherwise you risk a buffer overflow, which is nasty business. fgets is a better choice, because you are forced to limit the number of characters. This is how you would do that (Just replace the scanf line)

fgets(stringNAME, 10, stdin)