Question

I’m new to programming and have been working on an assignment in class. For some strange reason the program keeps printing 2 different printf’s on the same line and not giving me a chance to input information

Here is the code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main (void)
{   char Name[20];
    char cid1[6]="", cid2[6]="", cid3[6]="", cid4[6]="", cid5[6]="", cid6[6]="";
    char Description1[21]="", Description2[21]="", Description3[21]="", Description4[21]="", Description5[21]="", Description6[21]="";
int hrs1 = 0, hrs2=0, hrs3=0, hrs4=0, hrs5=0, hrs6=0;
char grade1[2]="",grade2[2]="",grade3[2]="",grade4[2]="",grade5[2]="",grade6[2]="";

printf("Enter Students Name ");
fgets(Name, 20, stdin);

printf("Enter Class ID ");
scanf("%5s", cid1);

printf("Enter Class Description ");             // Problem
fgets(Description1, 20, stdin);                 // here

printf("Enter Class Hours ");
scanf("%d", &hrs1);

printf("Enter Class Grade ");
fgets(grade1, 1, stdin);

printf("%s\n", Name);
printf("%s\n", cid1);
printf("%s\n", Description1);
printf("%d\n", hrs1);
printf("%s\n", grade1);

system("pause");

return 0;

The area marked “Problem here” is where the problem is currently occurring. In stead of prompting for the class description it will skip straight to entering class hours and completely ignore the enter class grade at the bottom.

It prints it as: Enter Class DescriptionEnter Class Hours.

Answer 1

They are trying to teach you the difference between scanf and fgets. And they are probably tricking you by telling you that the Class ID has to be 4 characters.

So if your Class ID is “1234” and you hit Enter after, what ends up in stdin is:

1234\r\n

The %5s format in scanf says to read 5 characters and then move on. So, you read in 1234\r and leave \n in the stdin stream. Then when fgets executes, it reads in the \n and moves on.

From the above on fgets:

Get string from stream

Reads characters from stream and stores them as a C string into str
until (num-1) characters have been read or either a newline or the
end-of-file is reached, whichever happens first.