Question:
Could you tell me what the proper syntax is for the sscanf function, and what return/error codes exist. This was for a Sparc-compiled program.

Answer:
Though newer programmers seem to favor the stream I/O classes, both sprintf and sscanf are still available and are quite powerful.

There’s no way I can begin to cover all the options these two functions support, but they use similar format codes. sprintf formats one or more values to a string, and sscanf extracts one or more values from a formated string.

char lpstr[45] = “StringOne StringTwo 3 4”;char lpstr1[20], lpstr2[20];int i1, i2;sscanf(lpstr, “%s %s %d %d”, lpstr1, lpstr2, &i1, &i2);

This example shows how you can extract four fields from a string with a single call to sscanf. In addition, sscanf returns the number of fields successfully converted and so you can use the return value to flag errors in the input string.