How to read input of unknown length using fgets

Question

How am I supposed to read long input using fgets(), I don't quite get it.

I wrote this

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

int main()
{
    char buffer[10];
    char *input;
    while (fgets(buffer,10,stdin)){
        input = malloc(strlen(buffer)*sizeof(char));
        strcpy(input,buffer);
    }
    printf("%s [%d]",input, (int)strlen(input));
    free(input);
    return 0;
}

Answer 1

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void)
{
    char buffer[10];
    char *input = 0;
    size_t cur_len = 0;
    while (fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), stdin) != 0)
    {
        size_t buf_len = strlen(buffer);
        char *extra = realloc(input, buf_len + cur_len + 1);
        if (extra == 0)
            break;
        input = extra;
        strcpy(input + cur_len, buffer);
        cur_len += buf_len;
    }
    printf("%s [%d]", input, (int)strlen(input));
    free(input);
    return 0;
}

This is about the minimal set of changes that will give you the complete line of input. This grows the space by up to 9 bytes at a time; that isn't the best way to do it, but there's extra bookkeeping involved doing it the better ways (doubling the space allocated, and keeping a record of how much is allocated vs how much is in use). Note that cur_len record the length of the string in the space pointed to by input excluding the terminal null. Also note that the use of extra avoids a memory leak on failure to allocate.

The strcpy() operation could be legitimately replaced by memmove(input + cur_len, buffer, buf_len + 1) (and in this context, you could use memcpy() instead of memmove(), but it doesn't always work while memmove() does always work, so it is more reliable to use memmove()).

---

With length-doubling — the cur_max variable records how much space is allocated, and cur_len records how much space is in use.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void)
{
    char buffer[10];
    char *input = 0;
    size_t cur_len = 0;
    size_t cur_max = 0;
    while (fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), stdin) != 0)
    {
        size_t buf_len = strlen(buffer);
        if (cur_len + buf_len + 1 > cur_max)
        {
            size_t new_len = cur_max * 2 + 1;
            if (buf_len + 1 > new_len)
                new_len = buf_len + 1;
            char *extra = realloc(input, new_len);
            if (extra == 0)
                break;
            input = extra;
            cur_max = new_len;
        }
        strcpy(input + cur_len, buffer);
        cur_len += buf_len;
    }
    printf("%s [%d]", input, (int)strlen(input));
    free(input);
    return 0;
}

Answer 2

A better approach is to use an input mechanism that will allocate for you such as getline (or even scanf). (Note: scanf does not allocate in all compilers. It does in gcc/Linux, but does not with Windows/Codeblocks/gcc)

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

int main()
{
    char *input;
    scanf ("%m[^\n]%*c", &input);
    printf("\n %s [%d]\n\n",input, (int)strlen(input));
    free(input);
    return 0;
}

output:

$ ./bin/scanfinput
This is my longer string.

 This is my longer string. [25]

---

getline example

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{
    char *input = NULL;     /* input buffer, NULL forces getline to allocate */
    size_t n = 0;           /* maximum characters to read (0 - no limit      */
    ssize_t nchr = 0;       /* number of characters actually read            */

    if ((nchr = getline (&input, &n, stdin)) != -1)
        input[--nchr] = 0;  /* strip newline */

    printf ("\n %s [%zd]\n\n", input, nchr);
    free(input);

    return 0;
}