I am reading The C Programming Language (K & R) and playing with the code having some hard time understanding behavior of getchar() function and related EOF macro.
Environment: Windows 10 (Ctrl-Z as EOF).
Here's a very simple code snippet I'm playing with:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <limits.h>
int main() {
printf("Enter something:\n");
int c;
while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {
putchar(c);
}
printf("End\n");
}
- When I run it and input something it works very well (simple duplicate of the input):
Enter something:
hello world
hello world
a
a
a
a
- However, when I provide some input with
EOF(Ctrl-Z) at the end, the loop doesn't end for some reason, I've got a right arrow character. Why is that so?
Enter something:
hellow world^Z
hellow world→
Doesn't C have to read each single character and find Ctrl-Z to end the loop?
- In order to end the loop I have to provide Ctrl-Z on the separate line:
Enter something:
hellow world^Z
hellow world→^Z
End
or:
Enter something:
hello world
hello world
^Z
End
- What really bizarres me is a situation when I provide Ctrl-Z at the middle of the input - only a half of the input is printed:
Enter something:
hello^Zworld
hello→
And loop doesn't stop.
I would really appriciate any description of the provided behavior.
P.S: please, do not mark this post as duplicate. I know that there are tonn of similar discussions on this topic, but all of them don't really answer my questions.
