Reading a string with spaces with sscanf

Question

For a project I\'m trying to read an int and a string from a string. The only problem is sscanf() appears to break reading an %s when it sees a spa

Answer 1

Since you want the trailing string from the input, you can use %n (number of characters consumed thus far) to get the position at which the trailing string starts. This avoids memory copies and buffer sizing issues, but comes at the cost that you may need to do them explicitly if you wanted a copy.

const char *input = "19  cool kid";
int age;
int nameStart = 0;
sscanf(input, "%d %n", &age, &nameStart);
printf("%s is %d years old\n", input + nameStart, age);

outputs:

cool kid is 19 years old