Reading a sentence from stdin using fgets

Question

I've written the following code to read a line from a terminal window, the problem is the code gets stuck in an infinite loop. The line/sentence is of undefined length, therefore I plan to read it in parts into the buffer, then concatenate it to another string which can be extended via realloc accordingly. Please can somebody spot my mistake or suggest a better way of achieving this.

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

#define BUFFERSIZE 10

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
    char buffer[BUFFERSIZE];
    printf("Enter a message: \n");
    while(fgets(buffer, BUFFERSIZE , stdin) != NULL)
    {
        printf("%s\n", buffer);
    }
    return 0;
}

Thanks Rob

Answer 1

You have a wrong idea of what fgets returns. Take a look at this: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdio/fgets/

It returns null when it finds an EOF character. Try running the program above and pressing CTRL+D (or whatever combination is your EOF character), and the loop will exit succesfully.

How do you want to detect the end of the input? Newline? Dot (you said sentence xD)?

Answer 2

Assuming that you only want to read a single line, then use LINE_MAX, which is defined in <limits.h>:

#include <stdio.h>
...
char line[LINE_MAX];
...
if (fgets(line, LINE_MAX, stdin) != NULL) {
...
}
...

Answer 3

here a concatenation solution:

char *text = calloc(1,1), buffer[BUFFERSIZE];
printf("Enter a message: \n");
while( fgets(buffer, BUFFERSIZE , stdin) ) /* break with ^D or ^Z */
{
  text = realloc( text, strlen(text)+1+strlen(buffer) );
  if( !text ) ... /* error handling */
  strcat( text, buffer ); /* note a '\n' is appended here everytime */
  printf("%s\n", buffer);
}
printf("\ntext:\n%s",text);

Answer 4

If you want to concatenate the input, then replace printf("%s\n", buffer); with strcat(big_buffer, buffer);. Also create and initialize the big buffer at the beginning: char *big_buffer = new char[BIG_BUFFERSIZE]; big_buffer[0] = '\0';. You should also prevent a buffer overrun by verifying the current buffer length plus the new buffer length does not exceed the limit: if ((strlen(big_buffer) + strlen(buffer)) < BIG_BUFFERSIZE). The modified program would look like this:

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

#define BUFFERSIZE 10
#define BIG_BUFFERSIZE 1024

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
    char buffer[BUFFERSIZE];
    char *big_buffer = new char[BIG_BUFFERSIZE];
    big_buffer[0] = '\0';
    printf("Enter a message: \n");
    while(fgets(buffer, BUFFERSIZE , stdin) != NULL)
    {
        if ((strlen(big_buffer) + strlen(buffer)) < BIG_BUFFERSIZE)
        {
            strcat(big_buffer, buffer);
        }
    }
    return 0;
}