How to input a string using scanf in c including whitespaces

Question

Example if user enters:

My name is James.

Using scanf, I have to print the full line, i.e. My name is James., then I have to get the length of this entered string and store it in an int variable.

Answer 1

Try:

scanf("%80[^\r\n]", string);

Replace 80 with 1 less that the size of your array. Check out the scanf man page for more information

Answer 2

@Splat has the best answer here, since this is homework and part of your assignment is to use scanf. However, fgets is much easier to use and offers finer control.

As to your second question, you get the length of a string with strlen, and you store it in a variable of type size_t. Storing it in an int is wrong, because we don't expect to have strings of -5 length. Likewise, storing it in an unsigned int or other unsigned type is inappropriate because we don't know exactly how big an integral type is, nor exactly how much room we need to store the size. The size_t type exists as a type that is guaranteed to be the right size for your system.