Book Image

Learn C Programming

By : Jeff Szuhay
Book Image

Learn C Programming

By: Jeff Szuhay

Overview of this book

C is a powerful general-purpose programming language that is excellent for beginners to learn. This book will introduce you to computer programming and software development using C. If you're an experienced developer, this book will help you to become familiar with the C programming language. This C programming book takes you through basic programming concepts and shows you how to implement them in C. Throughout the book, you'll create and run programs that make use of one or more C concepts, such as program structure with functions, data types, and conditional statements. You'll also see how to use looping and iteration, arrays, pointers, and strings. As you make progress, you'll cover code documentation, testing and validation methods, basic input/output, and how to write complete programs in C. By the end of the book, you'll have developed basic programming skills in C, that you can apply to other programming languages and will develop a solid foundation for you to advance as a programmer.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
1
Section 1: C Fundamentals
10
Section 2: Complex Data Types
19
Section 3: Memory Manipulation
22
Section 4: Input and Output
28
Section 5: Building Blocks for Larger Programs

Reading formatted input with scanf()

In Chapter 19, Exploring Formatted Output, we exhaustively explored the printf() output specifiers using a variety of programs to demonstrate how these specifiers work. We can reuse much of that knowledge for input specifiers.

The input specifiers for scanf() are similar in syntax and meaning to the output specifiers of printf(), except for a few differences. Therefore, it is best to consider the format string specifiers for printf() and scanf() as only vaguely similar; do not rely on the documentation for one as a guide for the other.

The following differences should be noted:

  • printf() accepts precision specification, while scanf() does not.
  • printf() accepts the -, +, <space>, 0, and # flag specifiers, while scanf() does not.
    Note that the input strings may have the -, +, and/or # characters and scanf() will interpret them as flags; however, these cannot be specified in the format specifier...