How to read from stdin with fgets()?

Question

I\'ve written the following code to read a line from a terminal window, the problem is the code gets stuck in an infinite loop. The line/sentence is of undefined length, th

Answer 1

If you want to concatenate the input, then replace printf("%s\n", buffer); with strcat(big_buffer, buffer);. Also create and initialize the big buffer at the beginning: char *big_buffer = new char[BIG_BUFFERSIZE]; big_buffer[0] = '\0';. You should also prevent a buffer overrun by verifying the current buffer length plus the new buffer length does not exceed the limit: if ((strlen(big_buffer) + strlen(buffer)) < BIG_BUFFERSIZE). The modified program would look like this:

#include 
#include 

#define BUFFERSIZE 10
#define BIG_BUFFERSIZE 1024

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
    char buffer[BUFFERSIZE];
    char *big_buffer = new char[BIG_BUFFERSIZE];
    big_buffer[0] = '\0';
    printf("Enter a message: \n");
    while(fgets(buffer, BUFFERSIZE , stdin) != NULL)
    {
        if ((strlen(big_buffer) + strlen(buffer)) < BIG_BUFFERSIZE)
        {
            strcat(big_buffer, buffer);
        }
    }
    return 0;
}