What's the difference between gets and scanf?

Question

If the code is

scanf("%s\n",message)  

vs

gets(message)

what's the difference?It seems that both of them get input to message.

Answer 1

The main difference is that gets reads until EOF or \n, while scanf("%s") reads until any whitespace has been encountered. scanf also provides more formatting options, but at the same time it has worse type safety than gets.

Another big difference is that scanf is a standard C function, while gets has been removed from the language, since it was both superfluous and dangerous: there was no protection against buffer overruns. The very same security flaw exists with scanf however, so neither of those two functions should be used in production code.

You should always use fgets, the C standard itself even recommends this, see C11 K.3.5.4.1

Recommended practice

6 The fgets function allows properly-written programs to safely process input lines too long to store in the result array. In general this requires that callers of fgets pay attention to the presence or absence of a new-line character in the result array. Consider using fgets (along with any needed processing based on new-line characters) instead of gets_s.

(emphasis mine)

Answer 2

scanf() is much more flexible tool while gets() only gets one variable at a time.

Answer 3

gets() is unsafe, for example: char str[1]; gets(str) if you input more then the length, it will end with SIGSEGV. if only can use gets, use malloc as the base variable.

Answer 4

There are several. One is that gets() will only get character string data. Another is that gets() will get only one variable at a time. scanf() on the other hand is a much, much more flexible tool. It can read multiple items of different data types.

In the particular example you have picked, there is not much of a difference.

Answer 5

The basic difference [in reference to your particular scenario],

• scanf() ends taking input upon encountering a whitespace, newline or EOF

• gets() considers a whitespace as a part of the input string and ends the input upon encountering newline or EOF.

However, to avoid buffer overflow errors and to avoid security risks, its safer to use fgets().

Answer 6

Disambiguation: In the following context I'd consider "safe" if not leading to trouble when correctly used. And "unsafe" if the "unsafetyness" cannot be maneuvered around.

scanf("%s\n",message)

vs

gets(message)

What's the difference?

In terms of safety there is no difference, both read in from Standard Input and might very well overflow message, if the user enters more data then messageprovides memory for.

Whereas scanf() allows you to be used safely by specifying the maximum amount of data to be scanned in:

char message[42];

...

scanf("%41s", message); /* Only read in one few then the buffer (messega here) 
                           provides as one byte is necessary to store the 
                           C-"string"'s 0-terminator. */

With gets() it is not possible to specify the maximum number of characters be read in, that's why the latter shall not be used!