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cstringinputwhitespacestdin

How to get a string input from stdin that has leading white space in C?


Need a solution to get input string start with spaces?

I know a method to include space in input

scanf("%[^\n]s", s);

But its working only for space between words. I need a solution for string starts with spaces. And I also need the starting spaces in the variable


Solution

  • To get a line of user input, use fgets().

    #define S_MAX_LENGTH
    char s[S_MAX_LENGTH + 2];
    if (fgets(s, sizeof s, stdin)) {
      s[strcspn(s, "\n")] = '\0'; // Should code want to lop off a potential trailing \n
      ....
    

    Do not use scanf("%[^\n]s", s); nor gets(s);. They suffer from buffer overflow and other issues.