Can I use both scanf and getchar together to read a file?

Question

I am trying to read a text file. There are three sections in the file. The first line always initialises the size of a piece of land, the following lines up to the '&' apply characteristics of the land, then the last few lines describe movement through the land.

Example input:

4x4
(0,0)
(3,3)
&
(0,0)>(0,1)>
(0,2)>(0,3)

So far, I have got the 4x4 to be stored as needed but, after this, how do I:

1. continue from line 2 processing the lines differently
2. end that process at '&' and continue processing the last lines differently

My code that does not work:

/* process first line */
while (c != "\n") {
    scanf("%dx%d%c", &row, &col, &c);
    printf("The land is %d high and %d wide.%c", row, col, c);
}

/* process until '&' is found */
while (c = getchar() != '&') {
    printf("c=%c\n", c);
}

/* process rest of file */
while (c = getchar() != EOF) {
    /* do something else */
}

Answer 1

There are several issues that you have.

First of all, a character constant is denoted by single quotes, like so:

while (c != '\n')

Second of all, instead of using x in the format string, you can use %*c to eat all the characters, like this:

scanf("%d%*c%d%c", &row, &col, &c);

You should also add extra parentheses here to properly check inequality, like this:

while ((c = getchar()) != '&')

Same here:

while ((c = getchar()) != EOF)