mixing scanf and gets

[root]

> In article <2476 at brl-smoke.ARPA> rbj at icst-cmr (Root Boy Jim) writes:
> >Fgets is worthless on binary data.  It returns its first argument, which I
> >already know.  If a null is part of the data, how do you know where it
> >stopped reading?  Well if you're lucky, there will be a newline in there
> >and that's the end of it.  But if you're reading blocks of nulls, you're
> >SOL.  I would like fgets to return the number of chars read.
> 
> Clearly fgets isn't intended for binary data.  (Who writes line-oriented
> binary data??)  Probably fread is what you want.  However, I think you're
> right that nchars is a more useful return value (though I'd be satisfied
> with a boolean).
> 
> Karl W. Z. Heuer (ihnp4!bentley!kwh), The Walking Lint

Allow me to clarify my position. I came across this while writing an
SMTP implementation. Most of what you see is text, altho ANY char
may be escaped with a backslash. It would have been easy enuf to look
for a '\n' that was not escaped and pass back the entire line.

Even with ascii data, I often find I want the count more often than I
want the first argument, which I already know. Perhaps it's designers
didn't know what to return, so they just punted & returned the first
argument because so many other stdio funxions did. This is
regrettable, because fgets has the char count right at hand.

	(Root Boy) Jim Cottrell		<rbj at cmr>