Program is skipping fgets without allowing input

Question

Basically as the title says.. When my program is run from the console, it\'ll ask if you\'d like to encrypt or decrypt.. and when I input e or E, it creates a new blank line (un

Answer 1

The line scanf(" %c", &answer); is leaving a newline in the input buffer which is taken by fgets. The leading space in " %c" consumes leading whitespace but not trailing whitespace.

You can get rid of the newline with the "%*c" format specifier in scanf which reads the newline but discards it. No var argument needs to be supplied.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    char answer;
    char text[50] = {0};
    scanf(" %c%*c", &answer);
    fgets(text, sizeof text, stdin);
    printf ("%c %s\n", answer, text);
    return 0;
}

Answer 2

From http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/fgets/

"Reads characters from stream and stores them as a C string into str until (num-1) characters have been read or either a newline or the end-of-file is reached, whichever happens first."

Presumably you press Enter after typing E or D. Your scanf() doesn't consume the newline so it remains in the input stream. fgets() sees the newline and returns.