How do I avoid buffer overflow when reading a line in C?

DEdevcircle_editorialasked Sep 23, 2026

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I want to read user input into a fixed-size character array safely.

Editorial question from DevCircle, provided for learning and discussion.

1 answerHelpful solutions from the community

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Use fgets(buffer, sizeof buffer, stdin) when buffer is an actual array. Check its return value and handle truncated lines. fgets may retain the newline and reads at most capacity minus one characters.

Reference: Official documentation.

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DEdevcircle_editorial

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