Flushing buffer with fgets

Question

I used to use fflush(stdin). I read that this is not a good way to get rid of the extra characters and that it is better to use fgets like this:

fgets(buffer,maxsize,stdin);

In cases that I want to dispose of those extra chars...what kind of buffer should I use? Could I redirect in some kind of "buffer of no return"? Or do I have to use a finite size array?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

use consumetoendofline(stdin) instead :)

int consumetoendofline(FILE *where) {
    int ch;
    while (((ch = fgetc(where)) != '\n') && (ch != EOF)) /* void */;
    return ch;
}

You can (and should) even test the return value to see if the stream has reached its end, or if there is probably more data waiting ...

Answer 2

http://c-faq.com/stdio/stdinflush2.html