How do you include spaces in a scanf string?

Question

This program works as long as the "major" variable is only one word. For example, CIS is a valid input but Computer Information Systems is not. How do I fix this?

#include<stdio.h>

int main()
{
char major [51];
int classes;

printf("What is your major? ");
scanf("%50s", major);

printf("How many classes are you taking this semester? ");
scanf("%d", &classes);

printf("Your major is %s and you are taking %d classes this semester.\n", major, classes);
}

Duplicate question: http://stackoverflow.com/q/6282198/2777099 — Srinidhi Shankar, Apr 15 '17 at 01:51
Possible duplicate of [Reading string from input with space character?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6282198/reading-string-from-input-with-space-character) — Retired Ninja, Apr 15 '17 at 02:18

ad absurdum · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-15T02:04:13.490

You can use %50[^\n] to match up to 50 characters until a newline is encountered, and store them in major[]. The newline will be left behind in the input stream, but the %d conversion specifier automatically skips over leading whitespace characters.

Note that if the user enters more than 50 characters, there will be extra characters in the input stream to discard before calling scanf() to get the number of classes.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:17

Your problem is scanf stops at the first white space. What you need to do is keep reading until you read the end line character.

It's possible to do this with scanf but there are better options. fgets() comes to mind immediately. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/c_standard_library/c_function_fgets.htm

A few searches on Stack overflow will yield a ton of topics about the scanf() vs fgets() vs others. Using fscanf() vs. fgets() and sscanf()

How do you include spaces in a scanf string?

2 Answers2