I was writting a silly little program the other day and used the gets() function to capture user input from the keyboard. The code compiled successfuly except for one warning, warning me that the gets() function is dangerous. The compiler advised that I use something besides gets() in the fututre.
I dont know what else to use so I use gets() and it works fine.

What can I use to capture strings from
the keyboard besides gets()?

Why does the compiler think it's so dangerous?


ex.

char x[51];

printf("\nenter a string:");
gets(x);

The gets() function doesn't know a size of a result buffer which is used for readed string. Therefore if this buffer will be small for input string it can corrupt program. Instead you can use fgets() or scanf().

Using your example, try the following to get around the buffer overflow problem:

char x[51];

printf("\nenter a string:");
fgets(x, sizeof(x)-1, stdin);

This passes a max buffer size to the fgets function.

Good Luck,

Clyde

Yes, you can use scanf(), but if you do not specify a max filedwidth for "%s", or use automatic allocation ("%as"), it is dangerous the same way as gets().