Malloc and scanf

Question

I\'m fairly competent in a few scripting languages, but I\'m finally forcing myself to learn raw C. I\'m just playing around with some basic stuff (I/O right now). How can

Answer 1

First, the errors that was keeping your program from working: scanf(3) takes a format-string, just like printf(3), not a string to print for the user. Second, you were passing the address of the pointer toParseStr, rather than the pointer toParseStr.

I also removed the needless cast from your call to malloc(3).

An improvement that your program still needs is to use scanf(3)'s a option to allocate memory for you -- so that some joker putting ten characters into your string doesn't start stomping on unrelated memory. (Yes, C will let someone overwrite almost the entire address space with this program, as written. Giant security flaw. :)

#include 
#include 

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  char *toParseStr = malloc(10);
  printf("Enter a short string: ");
  scanf("%s",toParseStr);
  printf("%s\n",toParseStr);
  return 0;
}