Basic I/O concepts in C

How to perform input/output using printf and scanf in C

C is a small language, and the “core” of C does not include any Input/Output (I/O) functionality.

This is not something unique to C, of course. It’s common for the language core to be agnostic of I/O.

In the case of C, Input/Output is provided to us by the C Standard Library via a set of functions defined in the stdio.h header file.

You can import this library using:

#include <stdio.h>

on top of your C file.

This library provides us, among many other functions:

• printf()
• scanf()
• sscanf()
• fgets()
• fprintf()

Before describing what those functions do, I want to take a minute to talk about I/O streams.

We have 3 kinds of I/O streams in C:

• stdin (standard input)
• stdout (standard output)
• stderr (standard error)

With I/O functions we always work with streams. A stream is a high level interface that can represent a device or a file. From the C standpoint, we don’t have any difference in reading from a file or reading from the command line: it’s an I/O stream in any case.

That’s one thing to keep in mind.

Some functions are designed to work with a specific stream, like printf(), which we use to print characters to stdout. Using its more general counterpart fprintf(), we can specify the stream to write to.

Since I started talking about printf(), let’s introduce it now.

printf()

printf() is one of the first functions you’ll use when learning C programming.

In its simplest usage form, you pass it a string literal:

printf("hey!");

and the program will print the content of the string to the screen.

You can print the value of a variable, and it’s a bit tricky because you need to add a special character, a placeholder, which changes depending on the type of the variable. For example we use %d for a signed decimal integer digit:

int age = 37;

printf("My age is %d", age);

We can print more than one variable by using commas:

int age_yesterday = 36;
int age_today = 37;

printf("Yesterday my age was %d and today is %d", age_yesterday, age_today);

There are other format specifiers like %d:

• %c for a char
• %s for a string
• %f for floating point numbers
• %p for pointers

and many more.

We can use escape characters in printf(), like \n which we can use to make the output create a new line.

scanf()

printf() is used as an output function. I want to introduce an input function now, so we can say we can do all the I/O thing: scanf().

This function is used to get a value from the user running the program, from the command line.

We must first define a variable that will hold the value we get from the input:

int age;

Then we call scanf() with 2 arguments: the format (type) of the variable, and the address of the variable:

scanf("%d", &age);

If we want to get a string as input, remember that a string name is a pointer to the first character, so you don’t need the & character before it:

char name[20];
scanf("%s", name);

Here’s a little program that uses both printf() and scanf():

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
  char name[20];
  printf("Enter your name: ");
  scanf("%s", name);
  printf("you entered %s", name);
}