Since the Standard C committee did not standardize a simple replacement for gets(), what should it be?

Question

The gets function was first deprecated in C99 and finally removed in C11. Yet there is no direct replacement for it in the C library.

fgets()

Answer 1

IMO, any replacement would need to pass the sizeas well as the char * destination necessitating code changes that were significantly dependent on a case by case basis. A one-size-fits all was not deemed possible as the size is often lost/not passed by the time code gets to gets(). Given the we had a 12 year warning (C99 to C11), suspect the committee felt the problem would be gone by 2011.

Ha!

The Standard C committee should have made a replacement that also passed in the size of the destination. Like the following. (this likely has a name collision issue)

char *gets_replacement(char *s, size_t size);

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I attempted a fgets() based replacement that takes advantage of VLA (optional in C11)

char *my_gets(char *dest, size_t size) {
  // +2 one for \n and 1 to detect overrun
  char buf[size + 2];

  if (fgets(buf, sizeof buf, stdin) == NULL) {
    // improve error handling - see below comment
    if (size > 0) {
      *buf = '\0';
    }
    return NULL;
  }
  size_t len = strlen(buf);
  if (len > 0 && buf[len - 1] == '\n') {
    buf[--len] = '\0';
  }

  // If input would have overrun the original gets()
  if (len >= size) {
    // or call error handler
    if (size > 0) {
      *buf = '\0';
    }
    return NULL;  
  }
  return memcpy(dest, buf, len + 1);
}