SCANF TUTORIAL

Prerequisites. A rudimentary knowledge of simple C programs and printf, cf. [KR 88], Chap. 1.

Short Description. Input and output facilities are not part of the C language itself. Nonetheless, programs
interact with their environment! In C, printf is commonly used for output printings and scanf for input
readings. The syntax of these two functions are similar, with one main difference : The second and
following arguments of scanf are necessarly pointers indicating where the corresponding converted input
should be stored.

If you don't know what pointers are, don't worry about it ! This will become clear later on, see [KR 88],
chap. 4. For the moment, it is enough to remember to add before every variable v the ampersand
operator &, like &v, with one exception : no & is needed before an array, since an array name is already a
pointer !

Definitions: White Space Character, Word and String in C

• A word is an array of characters containing neither white space characters, nor the special characters
NULL ('\0', end of string) or EOF (end of file).

• A string is an array of any characters, including white space characters, and ended by the special
NULL character ('\0', end of string).

• Similarly, a Unix file is a file of any characters, ended with the special character EOF (end of file).

Example 1: Character Reading. The following program excerpt reads the next character from the
standard input and puts its value at the memory address &c of the variable c.
char c;
scanf("%c", &c);
Example 2: Input Fields. Suppose we want to read input lines that contain dates of the form 1 August
2015. The scanf statement is :
int day, year; char monthname[20];
scanf("%d %s %d", &day, monthname, &year);
scanf stops when it exhausts its format string, in this example the string "%d %s %d". Here, this string
contains three input fields.

For every input field scanf will read all characters until a white space or EOF character is encountered.
There is an important and natural exception : if the input field to read is a character (see example 1), then
only the next character is readed, whatever this character is.

The next call to scanf resumes searching immediately after the last character already converted. On the
end of file, EOF is returned. So the following program excerpt reads a list of dates from the standard
input :
int day, year; char monthname[20];
while (scanf("%d %s %d", &day, monthname, &year) != EOF) {...}
Remark. For all input fields, but not for %c, scanf reads the next word (for the character input filed %c, it
reads just the next character).

Remark 2 : About the input/output field %s. Note that with the input field %s scanf reads a word (and
adds at the end the zero character '\0'). But with the output field %s, printf prints a string !

Example 3: Literals. As in printf, literal characters can appear in the first argument : they must match the
same characters in the input. So we could read dates of the form mm/dd/yy with the scanf statement :
int day, month, year;
scanf("%d/%d/%d", &month, &day, &year);

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Example 4: Error Treatment. scanf stops when it exhausts its format string, or when some input fails to
match the control specification. It returns as its value the number of successfully matched and assigned
input items. This can be used to decide how many items were found and to make an appropriate error
treatment. The next call to scanf resumes searching immediately after the last character already
converted.

The following program excerpt illustrates a simple case. It allows you to read an input line that contains a
date of form 1 August 2015, until the input format is correct :
(1) int day, year;
(2) char monthname[20];
(3) int d; // d for diagnostic
(4) while ((d = scanf("%d %s %d", &day, monthname, &year)) < 3){
(5) printf("Number returned by scanf: %d\n", d);
(6) while (getchar() != '\n') ; // skip the rest of the input line
(7) }
If the three input formats are correct, scanf will return the value 3. Otherway, it will return the number of
correct readed values, i.e. 0 if the first input field is not an integer. Note that you have to skip the rest of
the line, since the next call to scanf resumes searching immediately after the last character already
converted : So in our case, if you don't skip the rest of the line, see line 6, scanf at line 4 would forever
read the same misformatted input !

More sophisticated error treatments are possible. Assume for example that, as in example 2, you want to
read a list of dates from the standard input until EOF is encountered, where some lines may contain
misformatted data. Note that these misformatted data could be a non intentional error, or just a comment
in your file you would like to skip. The following program excerpt illustrates this case :
(1) int day, year;
(2) char monthname[20];
(3) int d; // d for diagnostic
(4) while ((d = scanf("%d %s %d", &day, monthname, &year)) != EOF) {
(5) if (d >= 0 && d < 3) goto error; //--- error treatment
(6) // do some useful work
(7) continue; // read the next date
(8) error: //--- error treatment
(9) while (getchar() != '\n') ; //skip the rest of the input line
(10) } // end of readings
In an interactive mode you would perhaps add the line:
(9b) printf("Number returned by scanf: %d. Try again.\n", d);
Example 5: Summary. In summary, scanf reads the next character for a %c input field, and a word for all
other types of input fields. All arguments of scanf are pointers :
(1) char c, s[10]; int i; float f;
(2) scanf("%c", &c); // reads next character and puts its value in c
(3) scanf("%s", s); // reads next word and converts it to a string
(4) scanf("%i", &i); // reads next word and converts it to an integer
(5) scanf("%f", &f); // reads next word and converts it to a float
(6) scanf("%c %s %i %f", &c, s, &i, &f); // multiple reads
(7) printf("c=%c s=%s i=%i r=%3.1f\n", c, s, i, f);
(8) while (scanf("%c %s %i %f", %c, s, &i, &f) < 4) {
(9) // do the appropriate error treatment and retry
(10) }
(11) // at this step, the 4 input fields have been readed successfully

Note that no & is used with s at lines 3 and 6, since an array name is a pointer.

Reference. [KR 88] B. W. Kernighan, D. M. Ritchie, The C Programming Language, 2nd Ed., Prentice
Hall, 1988, chap. 7.4

© Béat Hirsbrunner, University of Fribourg, 9 September 2007, rev. March 2008.

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