How to read string from keyboard using C?

You have no storage allocated for word - it's just a dangling pointer.

Change:

char * word;

to:

char word[256];

Note that 256 is an arbitrary choice here - the size of this buffer needs to be greater than the largest possible string that you might encounter.

Note also that fgets is a better (safer) option then scanf for reading arbitrary length strings, in that it takes a size argument, which in turn helps to prevent buffer overflows:

 fgets(word, sizeof(word), stdin);

I cannot see why there is a recommendation to use scanf() here. scanf() is safe only if you add restriction parameters to the format string - such as %64s or so.

A much better way is to use char * fgets ( char * str, int num, FILE * stream );.

int main()
{
    char data[64];
    if (fgets(data, sizeof data, stdin)) {
        // input has worked, do something with data
    }
}

(untested)

Tags:

C

String

Scanf