Curious Behaviour of "sscanf"

[Larry Jones]

In article <236 at c10sd3.StPaul.NCR.COM>, anderson at c10sd3.StPaul.NCR.COM (Joel Anderson) writes:
> On a call to sscanf as follows:
>                if (sscanf(argv[3],"X=(%d,%d)",&y,&z) == 2) 
> and an input string where argv[3] is as follows:
>                "X=(1,4"
> (not including the double quotes), why does sscanf in this case evaluate to
> true?  Sscanf matches the number of arguments but does not continue parsing
> the control string (i.e. true even though the closing paren is missing)?
> 
> Perhaps this is correct - is it?

Yep, that's the way scanf works.  The problem is not that scanf doesn't
continue parsing the control string -- it does -- the problem is that it
doesn't have any way to let you know there was a problem.  The definition
of scanf states that it returns the number of items successfully converted;
since it successfully converted 2 arguments, that's what it returned and
that's what you were expecting.

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