scanning a line of strings with spaces using scanf

Question

I was using scanf for all my inputs in C. Now I saw other similar questions about scanf() and they suggested using fgets() instead of scanf() . I will do so in the future. However, at the moment this particular part of code with scanf() never seems to work. I know there is a solution.

My code is:

#define LENGTH 1000
#define WORD 100
int main(){
    int i = 0;
    char s[WORD][LENGTH];
    do {
        scanf("%s", s[i]);
        i++;
    }
    while (s[i][strlen(s[i])] != EOF);
    printf("%s\n", s);

    return 0;
}

There should be something instead of EOF in the while loop which checks for the end of line. The final result should be an array of words in s[] and the program should print that array of words without spaces.

Answer 1

Unfortunately scanf() does not read the character you need to check for end of line, or at least not using "%s" as the specifier.

Instead, use the following

char line[100];
if (scanf("%99[^\n]", line) == 1) {
    fprintf(stdout, "%s\n", line);
}

This way, it does not stop at white space characters, and it behaves similar to fgets() , except that it does not read the '\\n' character and that might be a problem if you call it again.