C in a Nutshell

Name

wscanf

Synopsis

Reads in formatted wide-character data from standard input

#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>
intwscanf( const wchar_t * restrict format, ... );

The wscanf() function is similar to scanf(), except that its format string and input stream are composed of wide characters. The conversion specifications are like those of scanf(), except in the cases described in Table 17-11.

Table 17-11. wscanf() conversion specifications that differ from scanf()

Conversion specification	Argument type	Remarks
%c	char *	Conversion as by wcrtomb()
%lc	wchar_t *	No conversion, no string terminator
%s	char *	Conversion as by wcrtomb()
%ls	wchar_t *	No conversion

Example

wchar_t perms[11];
wchar_t name[256];
unsigned int ownerid, groupid, links;
unsigned long size;
int count;

count =wscanf( L"%10l[rwxsStTld-]%u%u%u%lu%*10s%*5s%256ls",
                 perms, &links, &ownerid, &groupid, &size, name );

wprintf( L"The file %ls has a length of %lu bytes.\n", name, size );

Assume that this code is executed with the following input (produced by the Unix command ls -ln —time-style=long-iso) :

-rw-r--r--  1 1001 1001 15 2005-03-01 17:23 überlänge.txt

The wscanf() function call in the example copies the string "-rw-r--r--" to the array perms, and assigns the integer values 1 to the links variable, 1,001 to ownerid and groupid, and 15 to size. Then it reads and discards the date and time information, and copies the rest of the input string, up to a maximum length of 256 wide characters, to the name array. The resulting output is:

The file ...