separator in scanf

[giacomomarciani]

How can I let a scanf recognize some separators?
For example:
user input a stream via scanf:

Giacomo Marciani,male,2 7/06/1990

The program should recognize "," and "/" as separators, and assign Giacomo to a char*, Marciani to another char*,male to another char*,27 to a int,06 to another int and 1990 to another int.

[weaknessforcats]

I would just read the entire sequence in as a sring and parse it out afterwards maybe using strtok.

[giacomomarciani]

isn't possible to use a simple scanf? :-)

[weaknessforcats]

scanf has an argument that is a char* where you supply your format string. This string uses % to identify a formst type. %d will fetch bytes until it encounters one that can't be part of an int. There's no notion of a delimiter with this function.

If you scanf into a string and call strtok you can specify your own delimiters. strtok will return the characters up to the delimiter as a token in the form of a string. You then strcpy this token into your desired variable.

[donbock]

According the documentation, the %s conversion specifier in scanf recognizes whitespace as a separator. If that's true, then you could read an input string of this sort:

Giacomo Marciani male 27/06/1990

with

char firstName[80];
char lastName[80];
char gender[80];
int day, month, year;
...
scanf("%s%s%s%d/%d/%d",
    firstName, lastName, gender, &day, &month, &year);

Take this advice with a grain of salt ... I never use scanf in my own software.