Clearing out stdin in C when it may or may not be empty

Question

I am a programming student looking for a way to get rid of characters that may be hanging around in stdin. I have tried a technique that has been given here in various forms, wh

Answer 1

There is no portable way of doing this, since the standard input is "blocking" by default you can't read from it in order to throw the input away without causing a block if there was no input.

If you have it, you can use select() to detect that there is input, and then do a read to discard it. I would recommend doing a "large" block read in that case, not a single character at a time.

Please note that getchar() returns int, the constant EOF does not fit in a character. It's an example of "out of band" communication, it's not a character.