Why char value assignment to float is not working - c

Note:This question is very simple but when I am searching in Google I haven't got any clear clarification.
I have following program
int main()
{
float c;
scanf("%f",&c);
printf("%f",c);
}
o/p
when I am giving a int value (e,g - 9) it is showing it as 9.000000
but when I am giving char value like 'a' it is not showing and showing 0.000000.I know the memory representation of float is totally different from int but then how when I am giving int value (9) it is showing but when I am giving char (a) which is also an int (97) is not showing.
How it is happening. What is the memory representation during char assignment.

Note that there are no chars here anywhere in your code.
This is the way scanf is supposed to work. If you check the return value from scanf (like you should be!) you'll probably see that it's returning 0, meaning no items were matched.
When you give scanf() a "%f" format string, that means "I want you to try and get me a floating point number. When you provide input like 'a', it's not going to match anything, because 'a' is not a valid floating-point number.
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/scanf/

First, you usually should end your printf format string with a newline \n or else call fflush.
Then, you should read the documentation on scanf i.e. its man page scanf(3)
It can fail, and it returns the number of successful matches:
Return Value
These functions return the number of input items successfully matched
and assigned, which can be fewer than provided for, or even zero in
the event of an early matching failure.
The value EOF is returned if the end of input is reached before either
the first successful conversion or a matching failure occurs. EOF is
also returned if a read error occurs, in which case the error
indicator for the stream (see ferror(3)) is set, and errno is set
indicate the error.
A failure is happening when you type an input letter a against a %f conversion specification. In your case the c variable is left unchanged (i.e. "uninitialized").
You should test the result of scanf (it is <=0 on failure in your case).

scanf in the form you wrote it will try to find and read numbers (int/float) up to the first non numerical character (newline, space, any letter). Letters are ints, but this is because of the scanf and the way it should behave. Read up the docs.

Related

Why does scanf return a positive value even when the input is larger than the numercial type given?

Given the following code :
int x;
int r = scanf("%d", &x);
why is scanf returning 1 when the user inputs a number larger than INT_MAX or even larger than LONG_MAX?
From the documentation:
Number of receiving arguments successfully assigned.
Why is x considered successfully assigned? What does it mean exactly in this context? When the user gives numbers between INT_MAX and LONG_MAX, x appears to be the lower half of the result. I know scanf uses strtol internally but scanf could determine that the type int is too small to contain the result. Further, when passing a giant number, larger than LONG_MAX, the value of x is -1 and the return value is still 1 and I have to rely on errno to check that something went wrong (errno == ERANGE).
What does "successfully assigned" mean and why does scanf return 1 given that it could so easily tell that the result is, in fact, garbage?
Unfortunately you cannot rely on errno == ERANGE or such in portable C programs.
fscanf is not documented authoritatively on cppreference.com, but in the ISO C standard. Firstly, the standard states that
The fscanf function returns the value of the macro EOF if an input failure occurs before the first conversion (if any) has completed. Otherwise, the function returns the number of input items assigned, which can be fewer than provided for, or even zero, in the event of an early matching failure.
I.e. nowhere does it contain the word "successful".
On the contrary, it says:
[...] if the result of the conversion cannot be represented in the object, the behavior is undefined.
I.e. unfortunately there are no guarantees of behaviour in this case. In particular the standard never states that the result would be the largest number, or that errno would contain ERANGE or any other such thing.
why is scanf returning 1 when the user inputs a number larger then INT_MAX or even larger than LONG_MAX?
It is undefined behavior (UB) when the input text converts to outside the int range for "%d". It is a specification weakness of scanf().
Anything may happen.
Robust code separates input from conversion. Look to fgets() and strtol().
"scanf" is a function that reads data with specified format from a given string stream source. It allows the programmer to accept input from the standard input device (keyboard) and stores them in variables.
"scanf" stands for 'scan format', because it scans the input for valid tokens and parses them according to a specified format.
Reads a real number that (by default) the user has typed in into the variable miles
Each variable must be preceded by the ampersand (&) address-of operator.
We can read values into multiple variables with a single scanf as long as we have corresponding format strings for each variable.
"scanf" successfully accomplishing the 'scan format' function. It's not the function of "scanf" to check for the range for corresponding datatype.
Remember that scanf (and its brothers and sisters) is a variadic function. There's value in telling the caller how many arguments were successfully assigned, where "successfully" might mean less than you think it does. It's the responsibility of the caller to make sure the arguments agree.

How does the following code works printf("%c")?

I wanted to know how the following program is working?
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
while(1){
if(printf("%d",printf("%c")))
break;
else
continue;
}
return 0;
}
I did not know how the part printf("%c") is working and therefore the whole program.I am aware of writing something like printf("%c", 'a'); like that but how is it working without providing the character to be printed? My question is what does the following program prints and how does it prints so?
I have tried to run the program, sometimes it prints nothing, but sometimes it is printing some random character followed by 1. I am not able to get how it is working, can someone please explain what is going behind the code and how it is printing that random characters, and why there is one at the end?
Here are some output I am getting
Welcome to Undefined Behavior. You fail to have sufficient number of arguments for the format you specify, e.g.
C11 Standard - 7.21.6.1 The fprintf function(p2) "If there are insufficient arguments for the format, the behavior is undefined." 7.21.6.1(p9) "If a conversion specification is invalid, the behavior is undefined. If any argument is not the correct type for the corresponding conversion specification, the behavior is undefined."
A cool wrong program you have.
printf("%c") attempts to print a single character that is supposed to be the second parameter. However, since you have never passed the second parameter, the function prints whatever is in the register that was supposed to have the second parameter. In other words, some random character. However, it prints one character and returns 1: the number of characters printed.
That 1 is in turn printed by printf("%d",printf("%c")). Now you have a random character followed by 1, and since the outer printf also prints one character, it returns 1.
Finally, if(printf("%d",printf("%c"))) interprets that later 1 as true and breaks the loop.
This is about format bugs.
Look at this code, when execute printf("%d", 123), the program will push number 123 onto the stack, and then push string "%d", when printf meets "%d", it will read the value on the top of the stack, so printf find the number 123.
Now look at this code, printf("%c"), program will push string "%c" onto the stack, and try to read value on the top of the stack, you haven't push a value for printf, so printf will still find value, but the value is random, so you might get a random value.

Why is this program not printing the input I provided? (C)

Code I have:
int main(){
char readChars[3];
puts("Enter the value of the card please:");
scanf(readChars);
printf(readChars);
printf("done");
}
All I see is:
"done"
after I enter some value to terminal and pressing Enter, why?
Edit:
Isn't the prototype for scanf:
int scanf(const char *format, ...);
So I should be able to use it with just one argument?
The actual problem is that you are passing an uninitialized array as the format to scanf().
Also you are invoking scanf() the wrong way try this
if (scanf("%2s", readChars) == 1)
printf("%s\n", readChars);
scanf() as well as printf() use a format string and that's actually the cause for the f in their name.
And yes you are able to use it with just one argument, scanf() scans input according to the format string, the format string uses special values that are matched against the input, if you don't specify at least one then scanf() will only be useful for input validation.
The following was extracted from C11 draft
7.21.6.2 The fscanf function
The format shall be a multibyte character sequence, beginning and ending in its initial shift state. The format is composed of zero or more directives: one or more white-space characters, an ordinary multibyte character (neither % nor a white-space character), or a conversion specification. Each conversion specification is introduced by the character %. After the %, the following appear in sequence:
An optional assignment-suppressing character *.
An optional decimal integer greater than zero that specifies the maximum field width
(in characters).
An optional length modifier that specifies the size of the receiving object.
A conversion specifier character that specifies the type of conversion to be applied.
as you can read above, you need to pass at least one conversion specifier, and in that case the corresponding argument to store the converted value, if you pass the conversion specifier but you don't give an argument for it, the behavior is undefined.
Yes, it is possible to call scanf with just one parameter, and it may even be useful on occasion. But it wouldn't do what you apparently thought it would. (It would just expect the characters in the argument in the input stream and skip them.) You didn't notice because you failed to do due diligence as a programmer. I'll list what you should do:
RTFM. scanf's first parameter is a format string. Plain characters which are not part of conversion sequences and are not whitespace are expected literally in the input. They are read and discarded. If they do not appear, conversion stops there, and the position in the input stream where the unexpected character occured is the start of subsequent reads. In your case probably no character was ever successfully read from the input, but you don't know for sure, because you didn't initialize the format string (see below).
Another interesting detail is scanf's return value which indicates the number items successfully read. I'll discuss that below together with the importance to check return values.
Initialize locals. C doesn't automatically initialize local data for performance reasons (in today's light one would probably enforce user initialization like other languages do, or make auto initialization a default with an opt-out possibility for the few inner loops where it would hurt). Because you didn't initialize readchars, you don't know what's in it, so you don't know what scanf expected in the input stream. On top it probably is nominally undefined behaviour. (But on your PC it shouldn't do anything unexpected.)
Check return values. scanf probably returned 0 in your example. The manual states that scanf returns the number of items successfully read, here 0, i.e. no input conversion took place. This type of undetected failure can be fatal in long sequences of read operations because the following scanfs may read in one-off indexes from a sequence of tokens, or may stall as well (and not update their pointees at all), etc.
Please bear with me -- I do not always read the manual, check return values or (by error) initialize variables for little test programs. But if it doesn't work, it's part of my investigation. And before I ask anybody, let alone the world, I make damn sure that I have done my best to find out what I did wrong, beforehand.
You're not using scanf correctly:
scanf(formatstring, address_of_destination,...)
is the right way to do it.
EDIT:
Isn't the prototype for scanf:
int scanf(const char *format, ...);
So I should be able to use it with just one argument?
No, you should not. Please read documentation on scanf; format is a string specifying what scanf should read, and the ... are the things that scanf should read into.
The first argument to scanf is the format string. What you need is:
scanf("%2s", readChars);
It Should provided Format specifiers in scanf function
char readChars[3];
puts("Enter the value of the card please:");
scanf("%s",readChars);
printf("%s",readChars);
printf("done");
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/scanf/ more info...

fscanf return value

What does fscanf return when it reads data in the file. For example,
int number1, number2, number3, number4, c;
c = fscanf (spFile, "%d", &number1);
//c will be 1 in this case.
c = fscanf (spFile, "%d %d %d %d", &number1, &number1, &number3, &number4);
//in this case, c will return 4.
I just want to know why it returns such values depending on the number of arguments.
From the manpage for the Xscanf family of functions:
Upon successful completion, these functions shall return the number of
successfully matched and assigned input items; this number can be zero
in the event of an early matching failure. If the input ends before
the first matching failure or conversion, EOF shall be returned. If a
read error occurs, the error indicator for the stream is set, EOF
shall be returned, and errno shall be set to
indicate the error
So your first call to fscanf returns 1 because one input item (&number1) was successfully matched with the format specifier %d. Your second call to fscanf returns 4 because all 4 arguments were matched.
I quote from cplusplus.com .
On success, the function returns the number of items of the argument
list successfully filled. This count can match the expected number of
items or be less (even zero) due to a matching failure, a reading
error, or the reach of the end-of-file.
If a reading error happens or the end-of-file is reached while
reading, the proper indicator is set (feof or ferror). And, if either
happens before any data could be successfully read, EOF is returned.
--EDIT--
If you are intention is to determine the number of bytes read to a string.
int bytes;
char str[80];
fscanf (stdin, "%s%n",str,&bytes);
printf("Number of bytes read = %d",bytes);
From the manual page:
*These functions return the number of input items successfully matched and assigned, which can be fewer than provided for, or even zero in the event of an early matching failure. *
Hence 1st one returns 1 if able to read one integer from the file, 2nd one returns 4 if able to read 4 integers from the file.
This happens to be a very straight forward question , and has been aptly answered by charles and ed before me. But they didnt mention where you should be looking for such things the next time you get stuck.
first the question --
the fscanf belongs to the family of formated input(scan) functions that are supposed to read a input and report some info on the data read like bytes or the count of items(variable addresses) that got a appropriate input read and had successfull assignment made.
here the fscanf is supposed to check for matches in the input file with the format string provided in the function call and accordingly assign the (in order of their position) variable - address with the value and once completed it will return the total count for the number of successfull assignments it made. hence the result of 1 and next was 4 (assuming input was provided properly).
second part: where to look ? --
well described details for such function are easily found in your manual pages or posix doc if you refer to one.
if you noticed , the previous two answers also contain small extracts from the man pages .
hope this helps.
The return value is not depending on the number of arguments to fscanf ,it depends on number of values successfully scanned by fscanf.

Having scanf in C return void instead of int

If I have a program that is using scanf to get user inputted data:
scanf("%d",&val);
When I run it through lint I get warnings saying that scanf returns a int and it is not being assigned anywhere. What is the c practice to solve this problem? Do I type cast it as void?
(void)scanf("%d",&val);
The C best practice to solve this warnings is simple: Check the resultcode. The scanf function returns in the int if the operation has gone ok or not, and stores the error usually in errno.
The lack of resultcode checks usually results in big errors in certain situations.
The proper answer, of course, is to not ignore the return value. For a robust program, you should always (EDIT: usually) check that the return value indicates success, and fail gracefully when it does not.
Ideally you would do something like
int scanVal = scanf("%d", &val);
if (scanVal != 1) {
// wait a minute, scanf couldn't match input to a "%d"!
}
and then act on the output in a sensible manner.
Instead of silencing the lint message, just check the return value to make sure nothing has gone wrong. From the man page:
RETURN VALUE
These functions return the number of input items
successfully matched and assigned, which can be
fewer than provided for, or even zero in the event of an early
matching failure.
The value EOF is returned if the end of input is reached before
either the first successful conversion or a matching failure occurs. EOF is also >returned if a read error occurs, in which case the
error indicator for the stream (see ferror(3)) is set, and
errno is set indicate the error.
scanf returns the number of input items successfully matched and assigned. Compare its return value to the number you expect in order to detect errors.
while (scanf("%d",&val) != 1)
printf("Try again.\n");
Use
#pragma warning(disable:<warning number>)
scanf("%d",&val);
#pragma warning(default:<warning number>)
And your compiler will suppress that warning.
The best practice is to assign the return value of scanf to see if all (or how many) items were read. In this particular case, if it returns anything but 1, something went wrong (e. g. you wanted a number but the user is giving you unprintable characters) and you should handle it appropriately.
If you want your code to be robust in the presence of bad input, don't use scanf("%d", ...).
For most errors, scanf("%d", &val) will return 0 to indicate that it wasn't able to read an int value (for example, if the input is "foo" rather than "123").
But if the input is syntactically valid but out of range (for example 9999999999999999999), the behavior is undefined.
Most implementations will probably behave sanely, but I don't know how much consistency there is.
To read an int value safely, use fgets() (not gets()) followed by strtol(). (fgets() can have problems with very long input lines, but there are ways to deal with that.)

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