how to take a birth date format as a input with string in c programming

Question

what is the best away to take a date format as input .like this.. dd/mm/yyyy. i do not like to use scanf("%d/%d/%d.........);

Answer 1

First of all you should avoid gets() to prevent buffer overflow.

Instead use the safest fgets()

char *fgets(char *s, int size, FILE *stream)

fgets() reads in at most one less than size characters from stream and stores them into the buffer pointed to by s. Reading stops after an EOF or a newline. If a newline is read, it is stored into the buffer. A terminating null byte (aq\0aq) is stored after the last character in the buffer.

Then you can use int sscanf(const char *str, const char *format, ...); which

reads its input from the character string pointed to by str.

Here is an example program :

#include <stdio.h>
#define MAXLEN 10

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    char date_of_birth[MAXLEN];
    int day_of_birth, month_of_birth, year_of_birth;

    fgets(date_of_birth, MAXLEN, stdin);
    
    sscanf(date_of_birth,"%d %*c %d %*c %d", &day_of_birth, &month_of_birth, &year_of_birth);
    
    printf("\nDay of birth : %d\nMonth of birth : %d\nYear of birth : %d\n", day_of_birth, month_of_birth, year_of_birth);

    return 0;

}