Question

Just learning C programming, and stuck on what I’m sure is something trivial about Do/While loops. I have a block of code that requires the user to hit ‘E’ to exit the program:

char exitletter;

do {
printf ("Please hit E to exit the Program\n");
exitletter = getchar();
} while (exitletter !='E');

However, if the user enters an incorrect character, it prints “Please hit E to exit the Program” twice. If the user enters say abcd, it prints the message five times.

Can someone please explain what is happening here?

Answer 1

A different answer though late:

You could have called fflush right after reading the character.

char exitletter;

    do {
        printf ("Please hit E to exit the Program\n");
        exitletter = getchar();
        fflush(stdin);
    } 
    while (exitletter !='E');

and this would have worked like you expected it to.