Is using a while block to do nothing a bad thing?

Question

I\'m currently working through the excercises in \'The C Programming Language\'. Here\'s one of my solutions:

int c;

while ((c=getchar()) != EOF) {

if (c == \         


        

Answer 1

I think it is perfectly acceptable.

I would either write it:

//skip all spaces
while ((c = getchar()) == ' ') {} 

to make it obvious that this one line of code does one thing.

Or I would write it like this:

while ((c = getchar()) == ' ') {
    //no processing required for spaces
}

so that it matches the rest of your code's format.

Personally, I am not a fan of the

while ((c = getchar()) == ' ');

format. I think it is to easy to overlook the semi-colon.