Thread: Ensuring user input is integer value (newbie question)

Hi,

I'm working on a tic-tac-toe program and one of my modules needs to take an integer value from the user and confirm it was valid integer input and print an error message if it is wrong and prompt the user to enter again.

I am not allowed to use a string and my other issue is that the function prototype has already been defined and needs to be used as is. I would use a IsDigit function and read the value entered as a char and check if it is between char 0 and char 9 but the input (parameters) have to be in int form.

PRE: User has been prompted to enter an integer and min <= max.
POST: an integer value, i, entered by user is returned, where min <= i <= max.
int GetIntInput(int min, int max)


Any ideas would be amazing. I'm just not sure how to do this without a string or reading each value in the input stream as a char.

Thank you!

scanf, sscanf etc are not suited for numeric input validation since they do not detect overflows.

Read in the number as a string and use strtol/strtoul to convert the input to a long integer, and then compare that result to what your allowed input range is.

Ronin was actually pretty close. It's a fact that you can subtract '0' to get the numerical version of any decimal digit, and isdigit only returns true for decimal digits.

Thank you! Sorry for the late reply. I figured out my issue and accidently forgot I posted this!
I really appreciate the insight though! :-)

Code:

int readLong(long *l)
{
  char *e,in[64];
  fgets( in,64,stdin );
  if(!strchr(in,'\n')) while( getchar()!='\n' );
  else *strchr(in,'\n')=0;
  errno=0;
  *l=strtol(in,&e,10);
  return *in&&!*e&&!errno;
}

checks all what you want, and now its easy with for your function:

Code:

int GetIntInput(int min, int max)
{
  long l;
  if( !readLong(&l) || l<min || l>max ) return INT_MIN; /* signals an error value */
  return l;
}