>I mean, gets() in such a loop does just fine, ie it would return "foo >bar", but I have yet to kludge up a functionally equivalent scanf(). > >Does this mean gets() is indispensable ? No, it means no such thing. Look under "f", as in "fgets()" in your reference manual. Yes, it leaves a '\n' at the end of the line, but it's not *that* big of a pain to remove it.