GETS in C Programming

The C gets function is used to scan or read a line of text from a standard input (stdin) device, and store it in the String variable. When it reads the newline character then the C gets function will be terminated.

In this article we will show you, How to read the string data from console using gets in C Programming, and the differences between the scanf and gets with example.

Syntax of GETS in C Programming

The basic syntax behind the Gets in C Programming language is as shown below.

char *gets(char *str)

or we can simply write it as:

gets(<variable name>)

TIP: You have to include the #include<stdio.h> header before using this Gets function.

Gets in C Programming Example

The gets method is used to read complete set of characters from the console. This program will help you to practically understand this gets function.

// C gets function example
#include <stdio.h> 

int main()
{
	char name[50];
	
	printf("\n Please Enter your Full Name: \n");
	gets(name);
	
	printf("=============\n");
	printf("%s", name);
	
	return 0;
}

OUTPUT

ANALYSIS

First printf statement will ask the user to enter any name or string, and the user specified string will be assigned to character array name[50].

printf("\n Please Enter your Full Name: \n");
gets(name);

Next, we used the printf statements to print the output.

printf("%s", name);

Difference between scanf and gets in C Programming

This program will help you to understand, the differences between the scanf statement and the gets function in c programming. And why we generally prefer gets over scanf, while we working with string data.

// C gets function & scanf difference example

#include <stdio.h> 

int main()
{
	char name[50];
	
	printf("\n Please Enter your Full Name: \n");
	scanf("%s", name);
	//gets(name);
	
	printf("\n=============\n");
	printf("%s", name);
	
	return 0;
}

OUTPUT

ANALYSIS:

From the above screenshot you can observe that, thought we entered Learn C Programming as the text we are getting the output as Learn. Because, scanf function will consider learn as one value, c as another, and programming as third value. Following screenshot will prove you the same

Let me comment the scanf(“%s”, name); statement and use gets function to read text from the console.

// C gets function & scanf difference example

#include <stdio.h> 

int main()
{
	char name[50];
	
	printf("\n Please Enter your Full Name: \n");
	//scanf("%s", name);
	gets(name);
	
	printf("\n=============\n");
	printf("%s", name);
	
	return 0;
}

OUTPUT

From the above screenshot you can observe that, we are getting the complete text without any missing letters.