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implementing `scanf` not reading input correctly in specific cases on C with GCC 11.2

👀 Views: 239 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-06
scanf input C

I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm having trouble with I'm getting frustrated with I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm running into an scenario where `scanf` doesn't seem to read input correctly when used in combination with a loop. I have a simple program that takes integer inputs until the user enters a negative number. However, I'm working with unexpected behavior when trying to enter multiple values on the same line. For example, if I input `5 10`, `scanf` seems to skip reading the second integer unless I hit Enter after the first one. Here's a snippet of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> int main() { int num; printf("Enter numbers (negative number to stop): "); while (1) { scanf("%d", &num); if (num < 0) break; printf("You entered: %d\n", num); } return 0; } ``` I've also tried using `fflush(stdin)` right before the `scanf`, but that doesn't seem to help at all. Additionally, I checked the return value of `scanf`, and it only returns `1` when it successfully reads a number. I verified that I'm using GCC version 11.2 on Ubuntu 20.04. I suspect that there might be an scenario with how `scanf` handles the buffer when multiple numbers are entered at once. Is there a better approach I should be using to read inputs in this scenario? Any help would be appreciated! This is part of a larger CLI tool I'm building. Am I missing something obvious? I'm developing on Ubuntu 22.04 with C. My development environment is CentOS. How would you solve this? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.