Reading a string with spaces and special character with sscanf

Question

For a project I'm trying to read an int and a string from a string. Here the only problem is sscanf appears to break reading an %s when it sees a space and some special character. I want to print only String which is present inside special character. Is there anyway to get around this limitation? Here is an example of what I'm trying to do:

Similar to this link with little change

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

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    int age;
    char* buffer;
    buffer = malloc(200 * sizeof(char));
    sscanf("19 cool kid >>> ram <<<", "%d %[^\t\n] >>> %*s <<<", &age, buffer);

    printf("%s is %d years old\n", buffer, age);
    return 0;
}

What it prints is: "cool kid >>> ram <<< is 19 years old" where I need "ram is 19 years old" . Is there any work around?

Note: some time "cool kid" string come "coolkid" like this also.

Answer 1

You had it, you just had your discard in the wrong place (along with a slight capitalization issue):

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

int main (void) {

    int age;
    char* buffer;
    if (!(buffer = malloc(200 * sizeof *buffer))) {
        fprintf (stderr, "error: virtual memory exhausted.\n");
        return 1;
    }
    sscanf("19 cool kid >>> ram <<<", "%d %*[^>] >>> %s <<<", &age, buffer);

    printf("%s is %d years old\n", buffer, age);

    free (buffer);

    return 0;
}

Output

$ ./bin/sscanf_strange
ram is 19 years old

Answer 2

Could use sscanf(input, "%d%*[^>]>>>%199s", &age, buffer); . Anything after the %s is irrelevant in scanning for age and buffer . Not checking if all scanned can lead to trouble.

Suggest checking that the entire line parsed as expected. The simple solution is to use " %n" at the end. This saves the count of char scanned if scanning gets that far.

const char *input =  "19 cool kid >>> ram <<<";
int n = 0;
sscanf(input, "%d%[^>]>>>%*199s <<< %n", &age, buffer, &n);
if (n == 0 || input[n]) {
  puts("Bad Input");
}

Answer 3

You need to look for things that aren't a > , and you need to suppress assignment on the correct bits:

sscanf("19 cool kid >>> ram <<<", "%d %*[^>] >>> %199s <<<", &age, buffer);

The length quoted in the format is one less than the number of characters available; it doesn't count the terminal null byte, in other words.