In the example below, if I enter a character in Mac OS X terminal, the program will get stuck in an infinite loop, printing Please enter a number:
line after line and never allowing the user to input anything. What's wrong with this code? What is the fix?
I want to change the code in a way that if a number is not entered, the user is prompted with an error message and asked to enter a number again.
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, const char * argv[]) {
int number = 0, isnumber;
getagin: printf("Please enter a number:\n");
isnumber = scanf("%i", &number);
if(isnumber) {
printf("You enterd a number and it was %i\n", number);
} else {
printf("You did not eneter a number.\n");
goto getagin;
}
return 0;
}
Edit: I edited the code after reading the suggestions, and fixed the infinite loop problem. This is not a bad fix for the infinite loop problem, and with a simple for loop I tell C to search for any none numeric character. The code below won't allow inputs like 123abc
.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#include <string.h>
int main(int argc, const char * argv[]) {
char line[10];
int loop, arrayLength, number, nan;
arrayLength = sizeof(line) / sizeof(char);
do {
nan = 0;
printf("Please enter a number:\n");
fgets(line, arrayLength, stdin);
for(loop = 0; loop < arrayLength; loop++) { // search for any none numeric charcter inisde the line array
if(line[loop] == '\n') { // stop the search if there is a carrage return
break;
}
if((line[0] == '-' || line[0] == '+') && loop == 0) {
continue;
} // Exculude the sign charcters infront of numbers so the program can accept both negative and positive numbers
if(!isdigit(line[loop])) { // if there is a none numeric character then add one to nan and break the loop
nan++;
break;
}
}
} while(nan || strlen(line) == 1); // check if there is any NaN or the user has just hit enter
sscanf(line, "%d", &number);
printf("You enterd number %d\n", number);
return 0;
}