Validating Text Input

[cassius1]

Hi guys, fairly new to C.
Basically, i'm just creating a simple data entry form and i was wondering if there was another way apart from using strcmp to validate text input.
for example, i already have this:

	do
	{
		printf("Enter your favourite sport from these options (Football, Basketball, Hockey or Baseball): ");
		scanf("%s", sport);
		for (i = 0 ; i < (int)strlen(sport); i++)
		{
			if (i == 0) cpu[i] = toupper(sport[i]);
			else sport[i] = tolower(sport[i]);
		}
	}
	while (strncmp(sport, "Football", 8) != 0 && strncmp(sport, "Basketball", 10) != 0 && strncmp(sport, "Hockey", 6) != 0 && strncmp(sport, "Baseball", 8) != 0);

at the moment, it doesn't accept input other than those sports but is there another way to do this without using strncmp?

thanks guys!

[nonoob]

strncmp() limits comparison to n characters. So if someone typed "Footbally" it would still match. May not be what you want. strcmp() would be better because the lengths of words must match also.

You could put all the allowable words in an array:
char *allowed[] = { "Football", "Basketball", "Hockey", ... };

Then loop through using

for (i = 0; i < sizeof(allowed) / sizeof(*allowed); i++) {
    if (!strcmp(sport, allowed[i])) {
        ... do stuff ....
        }
    }

Also, instead of forcing the input to conform to certain capitalization, use stricmp() which ignores case.