I write a lot of C but I literally never use scanf. C simply lacks the facilities to make such an API truly useful and flexible. You can't scan custom types, er

I write a lot of C but I literally never use scanf. C simply lacks the facilities to make such an API truly useful and flexible. You can't scan custom types, error handling is super limited, it's very easy to mess up the format string and potentially end up with corrupted data and security vulnerabilities. If you need to parse JSON or some high level format look for a lib, for instance I can vouch for cJSON which is very small and has a rather nice API (by C standards at least). If I need to parse a simple format string like "id:name:description" something like strtok_r does the job to split the components and then you can parse individual components any way you like, potentially offering better error messages. If I need to parse a complex format then chances are scanf wouldn't do the trick anyway, so it's either custom made parser state machine or lex/yacc. Note for instance that in the GTA case the call was `sscanf(p, "%d", buf)` which is a glorified strtol with vastly worse performance. I would seriously advise not using scanf and friends for anything serious. Too many footguns.