Question

My code is as follows

typedef struct
{
 char name[15];
 char country[10];
}place_t;  

int main()
 {
 int d;
 char c;
 place_t place;
 printf("\nEnter the place name : ");
 scanf("%s",place.name);
 printf("\nEnter the coutry name : ");
 scanf("%s",place.country);
 printf("\nEnter the type of the place : Metropolitan/Tourist (M/T)?");
 scanf("%c",&c);
 printf("You entered %c",c);
 return 0;
 }

If I run the program, it prompts for place name and country name, but never waits for the character input from user.
I tried

fflush(stdin);
fflush(stdout);

Neither work.

Note : Instead of a character, if I write a similar code to get an integer or a float, it prompts for values and the code works just fine.

int d;
printf("\nEnter the type of the place : Metropolitan/Tourist (M/T)?");
scanf("%d",&d);

Why does this happen? Is there anything wrong in the code?

Answer 1

The problem is that scanf leaves the whitespace following entered non-whitespace characters in the stream buffer, which is what the scanf(%c...) then reads. But wait a second…

In addition to being tricky to get right, such code using scanf is horribly unsafe. You’re much better off using fgets and parsing the string later:

char buf[256];
fgets(buf, sizeof buf, stdin);
// .. now parse buf

fgets always gets a full line from the input, including the newline (assuming the buffer is large enough) and you thus avoid the problem you’re having with scanf.