Question

test.txt:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc
The color of the car is blue

code:

FILE *fp;
char var[30];
int result

if( (fp = fopen( "test.txt", "r")) == NULL)  //open for read
    printf("ERROR");


result = fscanf( fp, "The color of the car is %s", &var);

After this executes:

opens file (not NULL and was able to execute an append when testing)
result = 0 //zero- in the case of a matching failure….?
errno = 0;
and var is garbage.

I was expecting fscanf() to match “blue”.

How should I correctly get blue into var?
Thank You.

Answer 1

Fscanf doesn’t work like this. It doesn’t look around nor scan the string for stuff to match. You have to supply a string exactly matching the format specifier. So you could do stuff like

result = fscanf(fp, "aaaaaaaaaaaaa\nbbbbbbbbbbb\ncccccccccc\nThe color of the car is %s", &var);

to achieve what you want.