Reading a string with spaces with sscanf

Question

For a project I'm trying to read an int and a string from a string. The only problem is sscanf() appears to break reading an %s when it sees a space. Is there anyway to get around this limitation? Here's an example of what I'm trying to do:

#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h>  int main(int argc, char** argv) {     int age;     char* buffer;     buffer = malloc(200 * sizeof(char));     sscanf("19 cool kid", "%d %s", &age, buffer);      printf("%s is %d years old\n", buffer, age);     return 0; } 

What it prints is: cool is 19 years old where I need cool kid is 19 years old. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Answer 1

The following line will start reading a number (%d) followed by anything different from tabs or newlines (%[^\t\n]).

sscanf("19 cool kid", "%d %[^\t\n]", &age, buffer); 

Answer 2

You want the %c conversion specifier, which just reads a sequence of characters without special handling for whitespace.

Note that you need to fill the buffer with zeroes first, because the %c specifier doesn't write a nul-terminator. You also need to specify the number of characters to read (otherwise it defaults to only 1):

memset(buffer, 0, 200); sscanf("19 cool kid", "%d %199c", &age, buffer);