C Programming - Managing Input and Output Operations

Input Output operations are useful for program that interact with user, take input from the user and print messages. The standard library for input output operations used in C is stdlib. When working with input and output in C there are two important streams: standard input and standard output. Standard input or stdin is a data stream for taking input from devices such as the keyboard. Standard output or stdout is a data stream for sending output to a device such as a monitor console.

To use input and output functionality in your program, you need to include stdio header:

Single Character Input and Output

getc is used to accept a character from standard input and is declared as follows:

You would pass stdin for the stream to get input from the command line. getchar also has the same definition as getc.  It is equivalent to getc with stdin as its argument.

fgetc function is recommended for accepting a single character from standard input and is declared as follows:

If the call to fgetc is successful it returns char, otherwise it will return EOF (End of File).

putc is used for sending a single character to standard output and is defined as follows:

fputc function is recommended instead of putc. fputc syntax is shown here below:

Below example demonstrates fgetc and fputc functions.

When fputc is successful, it will return the value, if it fails it will return EOF.

getachar.c:

Here is the output I got when typing "a" for my character: