Trouble with scanf

Hey all,

I'm quite new to coding in general so go easy on me.

I'm trying to replicate a game where entering numbers will perform different actions, where the first number will indicated what kind of action and following numbers will indicate to what extent.

E.g entering "1 2 3 4" would mean go up (1) 2(2) spaces and right(3) 4(4) spaces.

So far I have been able to perform an action when the user inputs 2 different numbers e.g "1 and 2". However, I'm am also required to be able to accept 4 numbers at once by a user e.g "3 3 3 3".
I have tried changing my scanf("%d %d", &a, &b) to 4 %d's however this then requires me to enter 2 more numbers and subsequently my code doesn't work. This is also looped, so the user can perform different actions again and again.

To reiterate, if I enter 2 integers it should perform a certain if statement I wrote. If I enter 3 integers a different action. And likewise for 4 numbers in one input. The user is not asked how many numbers they would like to input either.

Any help would be appreciated.

As a note, I've only learned if and else statements and loops, as well as printf and scanf and functions.

Thanks all!

We usually handle this kind of thing by first reading the entire line as a string, and then using sscanf to "scan" the numbers from the string. All the scanf functions return a count of the number of fields that they filled.

Code:

---

#include <stdio.h>
 
int main()
{
    char line[200];
 
    while (fgets(line, sizeof line, stdin) != NULL)
    {
        int d1, n1, d2, n2;
        int nfields = sscanf(line, "%d%d%d%d", &d1, &n1, &d2, &n2);
 
        if (nfields == 2)
        {
            printf("==> %d %d\n", d1, n1);
        }
        else if (nfields == 4)
        {
            printf("==> %d %d %d %d\n", d1, n1, d2, n2);
        }
        else
        {
            printf("Only enter 2 or 4 numbers.\nTry again.\n");
        }
    }
 
    return 0;
}

---

This allows lines like "1 2 3 4 5 6" where it will only read the first 4 numbers and ignore the rest.
Also like "1 2 hello 3 4" where it will read only the first 2 numbers and ignore the rest of the line.
If detecting bad input like that is important than you need to do a little more.

Is this right?

Quote:

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Code:

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int nfields = sscanf(line, "%d%d%d%d", &d1, &n1, &d2, &n2);

---

---

Maybe:

Code:

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int nfields = sscanf(line, "%d %d %d %d", &d1, &n1, &d2, &n2);

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by flp1969

Is this right?

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The format specs that read ints and floats and the format spec "%s" all skip initial whitespace so there's no difference in functionality.
Maybe your version is more readable, though.