I'm not fully sure that this is what you're looking for, but if your question is how to read an integer using <stdio.h>, then the proper syntax is

int myInt;
scanf("%d", &myInt);

You'll need to do a lot of error-handling to ensure that this works correctly, of course, but this should be a good start. In particular, you'll need to handle the cases where

  1. The stdin file is closed or broken, so you get nothing at all.
  2. The user enters something invalid.

To check for this, you can capture the return code from scanf like this:

int result = scanf("%d", &myInt);

If stdin encounters an error while reading, result will be EOF, and you can check for errors like this:

int myInt;
int result = scanf("%d", &myInt);

if (result == EOF) {
    /* ... you're not going to get any input ... */
}

If, on the other hand, the user enters something invalid, like a garbage text string, then you need to read characters out of stdin until you consume all the offending input. You can do this as follows, using the fact that scanf returns 0 if nothing was read:

int myInt;
int result = scanf("%d", &myInt);

if (result == EOF) {
    /* ... you're not going to get any input ... */
}
if (result == 0) {
    while (fgetc(stdin) != '\n') // Read until a newline is found
        ;
}

Hope this helps!

EDIT: In response to the more detailed question, here's a more appropriate answer. :-)

The problem with this code is that when you write

printf("got the number: %d", scanf("%d", &x));

This is printing the return code from scanf, which is EOF on a stream error, 0 if nothing was read, and 1 otherwise. This means that, in particular, if you enter an integer, this will always print 1 because you're printing the status code from scanf, not the number you read.

To fix this, change this to

int x;
scanf("%d", &x);
/* ... error checking as above ... */
printf("got the number: %d", x);

Hope this helps!

Answer from templatetypedef on Stack Overflow
Top answer
1 of 3
75

I'm not fully sure that this is what you're looking for, but if your question is how to read an integer using <stdio.h>, then the proper syntax is

int myInt;
scanf("%d", &myInt);

You'll need to do a lot of error-handling to ensure that this works correctly, of course, but this should be a good start. In particular, you'll need to handle the cases where

  1. The stdin file is closed or broken, so you get nothing at all.
  2. The user enters something invalid.

To check for this, you can capture the return code from scanf like this:

int result = scanf("%d", &myInt);

If stdin encounters an error while reading, result will be EOF, and you can check for errors like this:

int myInt;
int result = scanf("%d", &myInt);

if (result == EOF) {
    /* ... you're not going to get any input ... */
}

If, on the other hand, the user enters something invalid, like a garbage text string, then you need to read characters out of stdin until you consume all the offending input. You can do this as follows, using the fact that scanf returns 0 if nothing was read:

int myInt;
int result = scanf("%d", &myInt);

if (result == EOF) {
    /* ... you're not going to get any input ... */
}
if (result == 0) {
    while (fgetc(stdin) != '\n') // Read until a newline is found
        ;
}

Hope this helps!

EDIT: In response to the more detailed question, here's a more appropriate answer. :-)

The problem with this code is that when you write

printf("got the number: %d", scanf("%d", &x));

This is printing the return code from scanf, which is EOF on a stream error, 0 if nothing was read, and 1 otherwise. This means that, in particular, if you enter an integer, this will always print 1 because you're printing the status code from scanf, not the number you read.

To fix this, change this to

int x;
scanf("%d", &x);
/* ... error checking as above ... */
printf("got the number: %d", x);

Hope this helps!

2 of 3
8

The typical way is with scanf:

int input_value;

scanf("%d", &input_value);

In most cases, however, you want to check whether your attempt at reading input succeeded. scanf returns the number of items it successfully converted, so you typically want to compare the return value against the number of items you expected to read. In this case you're expecting to read one item, so:

if (scanf("%d", &input_value) == 1)
    // it succeeded
else
    // it failed

Of course, the same is true of all the scanf family (sscanf, fscanf and so on).

Discussions

c - What is the easiest way to get an int in a console app? - Stack Overflow
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August 21, 2024 - When using scanf() to read an integer, we use "%d" to tell the compiler we're expecting an integer input. We also use &x to give scanf() the address (memory location) where it should store the input value.
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W3Schools
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Dev-notes
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May 31, 2019 - It may be better to read the whole line using fgets(), and then process the input as required: Use fgets() to read an entire line of stdin within a while loop. Check the length of the input buffer - even though fgets() discards extra input, the user should be informed if input has exceeded available space and allowed to re-enter the data. Convert input to an integer using strtol().
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Techcrashcourse
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March 6, 2023 - In this example, the %d conversion specifier tells scanf() to expect an integer input value. The memory address of the num variable is passed to scanf() using the & operator, which returns a pointer to the memory location of num. If you need to read multiple input values, you can pass multiple pointers as arguments to scanf() in the order that they appear in the format string.
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Top answer
1 of 3
3

Like all of the other answers, the following solution violates the rule of not using arrays, because I cannot think of any clean solution to the problem which does not use them.

The problem with using scanf is that it will treat spaces and newline characters equally. This is not what you want.

For line-based user input, it makes more sense to always read one line at a time, and treat every line individually. In order to read one line of user input as a string, you can use the function fgets. You can then convert this string to numbers using the function sscanf or strtol.

Here is a solution that uses the function sscanf:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

int main( void )
{
    for (;;) //infinite loop
    {
        char line[200];
        int numbers[5];
        int num_numbers;

        //prompt user for input
        printf( "Please enter up to 5 numbers: " );

        //attempt to read one line of input from user
        if ( fgets( line, sizeof line, stdin ) == NULL )
            break;

        //verify that line was not too long for input buffer
        if ( strchr( line, '\n' ) == NULL && !feof( stdin ) )
        {
            printf( "Line too long for input buffer!\n" );
            exit( EXIT_FAILURE );
        }

        //attempt to convert string to numbers
        num_numbers = sscanf(
            line,
            "%d %d %d %d %d",
            &numbers[0], &numbers[1], &numbers[2],
            &numbers[3], &numbers[4]
        );

        //print result
        if  ( num_numbers == 0 || num_numbers == EOF )
        {
            printf( "Was not able to match any numbers.\n" );
        }
        else
        {
            printf( "Successfully matched %d numbers:\n", num_numbers );
            for ( int i = 0; i < num_numbers; i++ )
            {
                printf( "%d\n", numbers[i] );
            }
        }
        printf( "\n" );
    }
}

This program has the following behavior:

Please enter up to 5 numbers: 20 30 35 40
Successfully matched 4 numbers:
20
30
35
40

Please enter up to 5 numbers: 
Was not able to match any numbers.

Please enter up to 5 numbers: 12 17
Successfully matched 2 numbers:
12
17

Please enter up to 5 numbers: 5
Successfully matched 1 numbers:
5

Here is a solution which uses the function strtol instead of sscanf:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

#define MAX_NUMBERS 5

int main( void )
{
    for (;;) //infinite loop
    {
        char line[200], *p = line, *q;
        long numbers[MAX_NUMBERS];
        int num_numbers = 0;

        //prompt user for input
        printf( "Please enter up to 5 numbers: " );

        //attempt to read one line of input from user
        if ( fgets( line, sizeof line, stdin ) == NULL )
            break;

        //verify that line was not too long for input buffer
        if ( strchr( line, '\n' ) == NULL && !feof( stdin ) )
        {
            printf( "Line too long for input buffer!\n" );
            exit( EXIT_FAILURE );
        }

        //convert as many numbers as possible
        for ( int i = 0; i < MAX_NUMBERS; i++ )
        {
            numbers[i] = strtol( p, &q, 10 );
            if ( p == q )
                break;

            p = q;
            num_numbers++;
        }

        //print result
        if  ( num_numbers == 0 )
        {
            printf( "Was not able to match any numbers.\n" );
        }
        else
        {
            printf( "Successfully matched %d numbers:\n", num_numbers );
            for ( int i = 0; i < num_numbers; i++ )
            {
                printf( "%ld\n", numbers[i] );
            }
        }
        printf( "\n" );
    }
}

This second program has exactly the same output as the first program.

2 of 3
2

I would suggest to get a whole line and then parse it:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main() {
    char line[1024];
    if (fgets(line, 1024, stdin) == NULL) {
        perror("Error occured");
        return 2;
    }
    if (line[strlen(line)-1] != '\n') {
        while (getchar() != '\n');
    } else {
        line[strlen(line)-1] = '\0';
    }
    int counter = 0;
    for (char * word = strtok(line, " "); word; word = strtok(NULL, " ")) {
        int number = atoi(word);
        // do something with your number
        counter++;
    }
    if (counter == 0) {
        return 1;
    }
    return 0;
}
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