Reading a string with spaces with sscanf

The following line will start reading a number (%d) followed by anything different from tabs or newlines (%[^\t\n]).

sscanf("19 cool kid", "%d %[^\t\n]", &age, buffer);

You want the %c conversion specifier, which just reads a sequence of characters without special handling for whitespace.

Note that you need to fill the buffer with zeroes first, because the %c specifier doesn't write a nul-terminator. You also need to specify the number of characters to read (otherwise it defaults to only 1):

memset(buffer, 0, 200);
sscanf("19 cool kid", "%d %199c", &age, buffer);