What does an asterisk in a scanf format specifier mean? [duplicate]

Question

So I stumbled across this code and I haven't been able to figure out what the purpose of it is, or how it works:

int word_count; scanf("%d%*c", &word_count); 

My first thought was that %*d was referencing a char pointer or disallowing word_count from taking char variables.

Can someone please shed some light on this?

Answer 1

*c means, that a char will be read but won't be assigned, for example for the input "30a" it will assign 30 to word_count, but 'a' will be ignored.

Answer 2

The * in "%*c" stands for assignment-suppressing character *: If this option is present, the function does not assign the result of the conversion to any receiving argument.¹ So the character will be read but not assigned to any variable.

---

_Footnotes:

_{1. fscanf}