I/O error, extra text in output

Hello everyone,

Below is a small program that ends when -999 is entered, then a summary is printed. However, my program is printing the -999 in the summary and then prints out random characters.

Can anyone tell me how to stop the -999 from being output in the summary, as well as the other characters? I thought that the carot added to the scanf would prevent the -999 from printing. Or is that just text?

As always, your help is appreciated!

#include <stdio.h>
void main (void)



{

int x,account[5];
float balance[5];
char name[5][30];


printf("Enter client account number, name and balance.\n");

printf("Enter -999 to end input.\n\n");


for (x=0; x <5 ; x++)


{

printf("? ");


scanf("%i[^-999]",&account[x]);

if(account[x] == -999)

{
fflush(stdin);
break;

}


scanf("%30s",name[x]);


scanf("%f",&balance[x]);



}



printf("\n\nACCOUNT \tLASTNAME \tBALANCE\n");



for (x=0; x<5; x++)

{

printf("%i %20s %14.2f \n", account[x], name[x], balance[x]);


}

}

>> my program is printing the -999 in the summary and then prints out random characters.
The reason I suspect you're getting random stuff is because you haven't explicitly initialized the arrays account, balance or name.

>> I thought that the carot added to the scanf would prevent the -999 from printing
scanf() is used for accepting user input, not printing. Your ^-999 filter doesn't work the way you think, so you might as well remove it. With that said, I would handle it by putting code to break out of the printing loop, if -999 is encountered.

After implementing those two suggestions, your code should look something like this :


Please note that I typed the above code off the top of my head, so there may be some minor syntax errors. HTH

Thanks so much!

I'm wondering why we are initializing within a for loop?

Couldn't we just initialize without the loop?

Kathy

It works great now. Moving the if statement in the third loop to above the printf statement got rid of the -999, and the extra garbage that came with it.

One of these days I'm going to get this stuff!

Kathy