Scanning until new line

Question

I want to read all the text entered until a new line character is entered.

This is my code.

int i=0;
char ch[MAX];
printf("Enter the text\n");
while(true)
{
     scanf("%c",&ch[i]);
     if(ch[i]=='\n')
         break;
     i++;
}

But when I try to execute it reads only one word.

I have also tried scanf("%s",ch); but the result is the same.

Answer 1

Transferring comment to answer.

Your code will work. The code you posted scans everything until a newline character(\n) is found. But as Jonathan Leffler commented, you never NUL-terminate your string. To do it just use

ch[i]='\0';

after the loop. Also, the user could enter more characters than MAX-1(One extra for the \0 at the end) and this could cause a buffer overflow. You should add a check like

if(i==MAX-1)
break;

just before your scanf in order to prevent it from overflowing.

Note that scanf("%s",ch); will scan until it encounters a space or a newline character.

---

Instead of looping and scanning character by character, just use

scanf("%[^\n]",ch);
getchar();

The above scanf scans everything until a newline character is found and puts them in ch. The getchar() then discards the \n from the stdin. You can also improve safety by limiting the amount of characters that scanf reads into ch.

scanf("%49[^\n]",ch);

The above scanf will scan a maximum of 49 characters and will add a \0 at the end. You can substitute the value of MAX-1 there. I've used 50 as an example.

Answer 2

You're not checking that scanf() succeeds before relying on ch[i] to have a valid value, that's not a good idea.

Just use fgets() to read a whole line at once.