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)