Thread: left over buffer characters

hey brainiacks!!

I need a little help if somebody has got five minutes.

i wana know how and why i sometimes get characters left
over in the buffer, resulting in a getchar() (i'm learning c)
not working. I've read a few articles and the 'how to' on pausing
the screen in FAQ's but nothing has answeared my question.

If you could give a code example as well id be both greatful
and enlightened.

Most likely, you are just using a bad conbination of scanf and getchar, and need to read some FAQ. If that is the case,
http://c-faq.com/stdio/scanfinterlace.html
http://c-faq.com/stdio/scanfhang.html

Many times in input routines the terminal will pause and give time for the user to type, and usually the user presses enter when he finishes.

Depending on how you have your program set up, and the kind of data you are asking for, it is always easy for the user to type more than you might need. The extra data does not disappear, it stays in the input buffer. Even if the user is responsible and types exactly what you need many input functions use Enter as a signal to stop recording, and there is an extra newline in the buffer. When your function returns this extra data is still there, it does not (and maybe shouldn't try) to clean up after itself.

So programmers have to come up with a few nifty solutions to try and "flush" the input buffer. Lucky people have an implementation of fflush(stdin); but that is not guaranteed by Standard C, and is not portable. Many people just choose to read input differently, perhaps by roll their own input functions where all the input is stored at some point, completely avoiding the headache. Some just clean it up with getchar() in a loop.

thanks for the answears.

they were really helpful.

I especially liked ' itsme86 ' caption...." If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything."

very true!