How can I read an input string of unknown length?

Question

If I don\'t know how long the word is, I cannot write char m[6];,
The length of the word is maybe ten or twenty long. How can I use scanf to ge

Answer 1

There is a new function in C standard for getting a line without specifying its size. getline function allocates string with required size automatically so there is no need to guess about string's size. The following code demonstrate usage:

#include 
#include 


int main(void)
{
    char *line = NULL;
    size_t len = 0;
    ssize_t read;

    while ((read = getline(&line, &len, stdin)) != -1) {
        printf("Retrieved line of length %zu :\n", read);
        printf("%s", line);
    }

    if (ferror(stdin)) {
        /* handle error */
    }

    free(line);
    return 0;
}