Question

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How do you allow spaces to be entered using scanf?
How can I scan strings with spaces in them using scanf()?

New to C and I feel this should be very simple but for some reason I’m not seeing the clear answer.

Trying to write a name and address to a file but if I put ‘FirstName LastName’ only FirstName gets entered into the file. Same with address. Is there a way to accept the whole name with the space into the file?

struct person{
     char name[20];
     char address[50];
     char telno[20];
} info;

fp=fopen("contacts","a")

printf("Enter Name : ");
scanf("%s",info.name);

printf("Enter Address : ");
scanf("%s",info.address);

fprintf(fp,"%20s %20s %20s",info.name,info.address,info.telno);
fclose(fp);

New to C so please excuse my ignorance. Thanks.

Answer 1

The only way to read “white space” in to a string with scanf() is with the negated scanset:

// This will read into comment everything up until the newline
scanf(" %[^\n]",info.name); 

In general the answer you’re going to get however is to “not use scanf” and use fgets() instead:

fgets(info.name, sizeof info.name, stdin);

Don’t forget a lot of this info for scanf() and fgets() and others is easy to get with a quick search.

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Edit: I tried replacing scanf with fgets but when I run the program it skips past the "Enter Name:"

If it’s “skiping” by your fgets() that means that your fgets() just read a left over character that was sitting on the stdin buffer. I’d wager a guess it was a newline character.

When you enter a string:

john smith

You’re getting a newline '\n' appended to the end after the 'h'. That means scanf() is going to read the letters and leave the newline, fgets() on the other hand will read everything up to/including the newline. So if you were to do this:

scanf("%s",info.name);

fgets(info.address, sizeof info.address, stdin);

The fgets() would appear to be “skipped”. If you’re saying replacing both with fgets() is skipping the first one, then your stdin buffer isn’t clean and you must have something before hand leaving a newline character on it.