A lot of new C programmers have trouble with scanf(). So I'm going to show you how to implement scanf in C in this tutorial.
The main reason beginners have trouble is scanf works like a pointer so you have to point to what you are getting input for
#include<stdio.h> int main() { int myvariable; printf("Enter a number:"); scanf("%d",&myvariable); printf("%d",myvariable); return 0; }
See, when we used scanf we first declared what the variables type was
"%d" for int ,"%f" for float ,"%e" for a scientific notation (1e10) ,"%c" for char , "%s" for strings.
Then in the second part we have to use & just like in a pointer to point to the variable instead of just getting its value.
Remember without & your program will likely crash.
For handling strings with whitespace (sentences) and in files use fgets. Here is one of our tutorials on using it:
Reading And Writing Files In C.
You can bookmark or print the manual page on scanf for later reference: Scanf() - C reference
If you are interested in finding out more, we also have tutorials on sscanf and printf (Part 1 and Part 2).
Do you have a scanf example to share?
Edited by Roger, 24 February 2013 - 09:43 PM.
added links