I wouldn't say it's good news.
I and many others here disagree.
> Firstly, it will break a lot of old
code if it's dropped.
Most people here (even those who have argued for keeping gets) think
that it is only useful for quick throw-away programs (which are not a
problem as they are going to be thrown away anyway) and very specialised
situations (which being very specialised do not occur often and so do
not make up a lot of code). Any other code needs to be fixed anyway, so
the sooner it will not build the better since it will force it to be
fixed or discarded.
> Secondly, gets() is completely safe *as long as
_you_ control the data passed to it*.
In such a situation you know the size of the buffer you have allocated
so is it really such a big problem to do:
fgets(buffer,sizeof buffer,stdin);
or
fgets(buffer,BUFFER_SIZE,stdin);
You could even write a macro
#define GETS(buffer) fgets(buffer,sizeof buffer,stdin)
which would be suitable for most usage.
> Of course it should never be
used in production code, but for private/development/toy code I find
it extremely useful.
See above for easy ways to live without it. If the buffer is not large
enough you are likely to find it easier to debug since the results will
be more predictable, if it is large enough it just means you have to
deal with the newline left in the buffer. So you could do:
#define GETS(buffer) ((fgets(buffer,sizeof buffer,stdin)!=NULL)? \
(buffer[strcspn(buffer,"\n")]=0,buffer):NULL)
Obviously you do not pass a pointer to this macro. It can be used as in:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#define GETS(buffer) ((fgets(buffer,sizeof buffer,stdin)!=NULL)? \
(buffer[strcspn(buffer,"\n")]=0,buffer):NULL)
int main(void)
{
char buf[10];
GETS(buf);
printf("'%s'\n",buf);
GETS(buf);
printf("'%s'\n",buf);
return 0;
}
markg@brenda:~$ gcc -ansi -pedantic -Wall -Wextra -O t.c
markg@brenda:~$ ./a.out
''
''
markg@brenda:~$ ./a.out
1
'1'
''
markg@brenda:~$ ./a.out
12345678
'12345678'
''
markg@brenda:~$ ./a.out
123456789
'123456789'
''
markg@brenda:~$ ./a.out
1234567890
'123456789'
'0'
markg@brenda:~$
Easily good enough for a throwaway program wanting gets type
functionality. I will even hereby grant everyone the permission to use
the code illustrated herein for any code of there own for any purpose
under any license with one exception. If you are publishing my idea
outside Usenet then you need my permission and inside Usenet you need to
acknowledge it as mine unless you can find prior art.
