How to invalidate an input in c - c

Question

I'm writing a program in C that is suppose to ask the user for a number.
The number has to be greater than zero and cannot have letters before or after the number. (ie: 400 is valid but abc or 400abc or abc400 is not). I can make my program invalidate everything besides 400abc. How would I make it invalidate an input if it starts valid then turns invalid? (I'm about 2 months into an intro to c class so my knowledge is very limited.)
#include<stdio.h>
int check(void);
void clear_input(void);
main()
{
int num;
printf("Please enter a number: ");
num = check();
printf("In Main %d\n", num);
}
int check(void){
int c;
scanf("%d", &c);
while (c < 0){
clear_input();
printf("Invalid, please enter an integer: ");
scanf("%d", &c);
}
return c;
}
void clear_input(void){
char junk;
do{
scanf("%c", &junk);
}while (junk != '\n');
}

Answer 1

You can also check whether ascii value of each char scanned from user input should lie in range 48-57, It will only then be integer value.

Answer 2

strtol can be used to do it, but it takes some extra work.
After running this code:
char *endptr;
int n = strtol(num_text, &endptr, 10);
n will contain the number. But you still have to check that:
1. *endptr=='\0' - this means strtol didn't stop in the middle. In 400abc, endptr will point to abc. You may want to allow trailing whitespace (in this case, check that endptr points to an all-whitespace string.
2. num_text isn't empty. In this case, strtol will return 0, but an empty string isn't a valid number.

Answer 3

Read the input as a line, using fgets.
Check if all characters are numeric.
If not, it's invalid. If yes, use sscanf to get the line into an int.
Check if the int is in the range; you're done.

Answer 4

Scanf with %d will treat the "400abc" as 400, all the trailing characters would be ignored, so there is nothing to worry about.
If you definitely want to treat "400abc" as an invalid input, then maybe you shouldn't use %d in scanf, use %s instead?

Answer 5

One way is to read the whole line as a string and check by yourself if it contains any non-digits.
The other way is reading the integer and then looking into the input using fgetc() to see if the next character after the detected input is valid. Or you could even use the same scanf() for this:
char delim;
if(scanf("%d%c", &c, &delim) == 2 && !isspace(delim))
// the input is invalid

Answer 6

You can read the number in a character array and validate it by checking if all the characters lie in the ascii range 48 to 57 ( '0' to '9' ) .If so your no. is valid otherwise you can safely regard it as invalid input.Here the the demonstration :
#include<stdio.h>
#include<string.h>
int conv( char * word )
{
int ans=0;
int res=0;
for(int i=0;i<strlen(word);i++)
if(word[i]>='0' && word[i]<='9')
ans=(ans*10) + (word[i] - '0');
else
res=-999;
if(res==-999)
return res;
else
return ans;
}
int main()
{
char a[10];
gets(a);
int b=conv(a);
if(b==-999)
printf("Invalid Entry.\n");
else
printf("Success.No is %d.\n",b);
return 0;
}
You can adjust for negatives as well by checking the first character in the word array to be '-' and adjusting the sign accordingly.

Answer 7

This is C99, so compile with -std=c99
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#include <stdbool.h>
bool getNum(int *n) {
char c, s[10];
if (!scanf("%9s", s))
return false;
for (int i=0; c=s[i]; i++)
if (!isdigit(c))
return false;
*n = atoi(s);
return true;
}
int main() {
int n;
if (getNum(&n))
printf("you entered %d\n", n);
else
printf("you did not enter a number\n");
}

Answer 8

The following is your check function rewritten to fix your problem, so try this:
int check(void){
int n;
char c;
while (EOF==scanf("%d%c", &n,&c) || n < 0 || !isspace(c)){
clear_input();
printf("Invalid, please enter an integer: ");
}
return n;
}