How to use fscanf, care about endofline? - c

Question

I want to read int from a file
The first line is composed of 1 int and the second of 2
ie
1
2 3
if i do
fscanf(FILE, "%d \n %d %d", &a, &b, &c);
I obtain correctly the 3 numbers
but if i put all the numbers on the same line in the file
ie 1 2 3
I obtain the same result (and that's not what i want)
I want to know : How to force the user to go to a new line in his file ?
Edit :
As it seems unclear to some (i'm sorry for that) i want that the file
1
2 3
Produce the result :
a = 1
b = 2
c = 3
And the file
1 2 3
produce either an error or
a = 1
b = 0
c = 0

Answer 1

You need to read each line into a char buffer using fgets and parse each line with its own sscanf. You can use an extra %s on the end of the format string (and an extra pointer argument to a dummy variable of type char *) to detect whether the line contains extra stuff after the fields you're looking for.

Answer 2

fscanf(FILE, "%d", ...); first scans and discard white space before scanning for int characters. In scanning white-space, both ' ' and '\n' are treated the same, so using '%d' loses the end-of-line.
fscanf(FILE, "\n", ...); and fscanf(FILE, " ", ...); do the same thing: scan and discard any white space. Using "\n" does not scan only for '\n'.
Code could use fscanf(FILE, "%d%*1[\n]%d %d", &a, &b, &c) == 3, to find a '\n' after a, but additional '\n' could be lurking in other places.
The only way using scanf() family to detect a '\n' involves using '%c' or '%[]' or '%n'. It is easier to use fgets() and then parse with sscanf() or strtol().
int Read1and2int(FILE *stream, int *a, int *b, int *c) {
char buf[100];
int n;
if (fgets(buf, sizeof buf, stream) == NULL) return EOF;
int count = sscanf(buf,"%d %n", a, &n);
// Non-numeric or extra data
if (count != 1 || buf[n]) return 0;
if (fgets(buf, sizeof buf, stream) == NULL) return 1;
count = sscanf(buf,"%d%d %n", b, c, &n);
// Non-numeric or extra data
if (count != 2 || buf[n]) return 1;
return 3;
}