Question

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scanf: “%[^\n]” skips the 2nd input but “ %[^\n]” does not. why?

Basically I have a customer struct where I am to enter customer details, one of which is the address. Of course the address is a sentence since this is a basic text program without graphics.

I’m trying to use scanf("%[^\n]",&VARIABLE) method because that worked in previous programs.
However here , the input is being skipped. I tried to flush the buffer before I take this input but it did not make any difference. I also tried to create another string and pass my input to that and then copy the data to my struct and that did not work either.

Here is my code – The problem is occuring at the 4th scanf("%[^\n]",&myCust.address) : (NB: this is a work in progress so you might see some extra prints and stuff for now)

void addNewCustomer()
{
    struct customer myCust;
    printf("\n\nNEW CUSTOMER ADDITION\n");
    printf("\nEnter customer id : ");
    scanf("%s",&myCust.idNumber);
    printf("\nEnter customer name : ");
    scanf("%s",&myCust.name);
    printf("\nEnter customer surname : ");
    scanf("%s",&myCust.surname);
    fflush(stdin);
    printf("\nEnter customer address : ");
    scanf("%[^\n]",&myCust.address);
    printf("\nEnter customer telephone : ");
    scanf("%s",&myCust.telephone);
    printf("\nEnter customer mobile : ");
    scanf("%s",&myCust.mobile);
    printf("\nEnter customer e-mail : ");
    scanf("%s",&myCust.email);

    FILE *fp;

    fp = fopen("/Users/alexeidebono/Dropbox/Customer_Application/customers.dat","a");
    if (fp == NULL) {
        printf("The File Could Not Be Opened.\n");
        exit(0);
    }
    else{
        printf("File Successfully Open\n");
   fprintf(fp,"%s*%s*%s*%s*%s*%s*%s#\n",myCust.idNumber,myCust.name,myCust.surname,myCust.address,myCust.telephone,myCust.mobile,myCust.email);
    fclose(fp);
    printf("Writing successfully completed and the file is closed!!\n");
   }
}

if you want my struct code here it is ( although i dont think that the struct itself is the cause of this problem )

struct customer
{
    char idNumber[11]; 
    char name[11];
    char surname[15];
    char address[30];
    char telephone[14];
    char mobile[14];
    char email[21];


};

Answer 1

scanf("%s",&myCust.surname);

This scanf leaves a newline in the input buffer

fflush(stdin);

is undefined behaviour by the standard, and doesn’t work reliably in my experience even if the library promises it would.

printf("\nEnter customer address : ");
scanf("%[^\n]",&myCust.address);

This finds the newline immedaitely. So it doesn’t read anything in, because it first encounters a newline. Make it skip whitespace first by including a space in the format,

scanf(" %[^\n]",&myCust.address);

Or use fgets or getline (if you’re on a POSIX system) to read in an entire line.