Differences between scanf and getchar in C

Question

I was trying to explain to my friend something about C coding and he asked me why his code (with "scanf") didn't work.

#include

int main() {
char x=scanf("%c",&x);
printf("%c\n",x);
return 0;
}

and this one yes

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
int k;
char x=getchar
printf("%c\n",x);
return 0;
}

Duplicate of [confused-about-getchar-and-scanf](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20970622/confused-about-getchar-and-scanf) — Shreyas Chavan, Jul 17 '15 at 23:01
What exactly didn't work? “doesn't work” is not an error description. — fuz, Jul 20 '15 at 00:39

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 20 '15 at 01:26

When scanf completes, x contains the character that was read. However, that value is immediately overwritten when x is assigned the return value of scanf, which is the number of items successfully matched or EOF in the event of an error.

If you call scanf without assigning the return value to x you should get the expected result.

For example, this should work.

char x;
scanf("%c",&x);

Differences between scanf and getchar in C

1 Answers1