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

Read directly into allocated space with fgets().

Special care is need to distinguish a successful read, end-of-file, input error and out-of memory. Proper memory management needed on EOF.

This method retains a line's '\n'.

#include 
#include 

#define FGETS_ALLOC_N 128

char* fgets_alloc(FILE *istream) {
  char* buf = NULL;
  size_t size = 0;
  size_t used = 0;
  do {
    size += FGETS_ALLOC_N;
    char *buf_new = realloc(buf, size);
    if (buf_new == NULL) {
      // Out-of-memory
      free(buf);
      return NULL;
    }
    buf = buf_new;
    if (fgets(&buf[used], (int) (size - used), istream) == NULL) {
      // feof or ferror
      if (used == 0 || ferror(istream)) {
        free(buf);
        buf = NULL;
      }
      return buf;
    }
    size_t length = strlen(&buf[used]);
    if (length + 1 != size - used) break;
    used += length;
  } while (buf[used - 1] != '\n');
  return buf;
}

Sample usage

int main(void) {
  FILE *istream = stdin;
  char *s;
  while ((s = fgets_alloc(istream)) != NULL) {
    printf("'%s'", s);
    free(s);
    fflush(stdout);
  }
  if (ferror(istream)) {
    puts("Input error");
  } else if (feof(istream)) {
    puts("End of file");
  } else {
    puts("Out of memory");
  }
  return 0;
}