Project Overview

Part of the Logic & Flow section of Coddy's C journey — lesson 20 of 63.

Challenge

Easy

Over the next few lessons, you'll build a simple text utility that demonstrates real-world applications of string and character manipulation.

Write a C program that creates the foundation for a text utility by reading and storing user input. Your program should:

Prompt the user to enter a short sentence by printing: Enter a sentence:
Declare a character array named sentence with 200 elements to store the input
Use scanf with the %s format specifier to read a single word from the user
Print the stored word in the format: You entered: [word]
Demonstrate that the character array is properly null-terminated by printing the length of the stored word using strlen() in the format: Length: [length]

Remember to include the <string.h> header to use the strlen() function.

Your output should display the results in the following format:

Enter a sentence:
You entered: [word]
Length: [length]

For example, if the input is:

Hello

Your output should be:

Enter a sentence:
You entered: Hello
Length: 5

Important: The prompt line must end with a newline immediately after the colon — do not add a trailing space before \n. Use printf("Enter a sentence:\n"); exactly as shown.

This challenge establishes the basic input and storage mechanism that will serve as the foundation for the text utility features you'll add in the upcoming lessons. It tests your understanding of character array declaration, string input with scanf, and basic string length calculation using strlen().

Try it yourself

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main() {
    // TODO: Write your code here
    // 1. Print the prompt message
    // 2. Declare a character array named 'sentence' with 200 elements
    // 3. Read input using scanf with %s format specifier
    // 4. Print the entered word and its length
    
    return 0;
}

All lessons in Logic & Flow

1Pointers Fundamentals

What is a Pointer?Declaring Pointers The Address-Of Operator (&)The Dereference Operator (*)NULL Pointers Recap: Pointer Basics

4Project: Simple Text Utility

Project OverviewCounting Characters

Counting Vowels

Convert to Uppercase

Final Output

7Structures (structs)

What is a Struct?Declaring a Struct Creating Struct Variables Accessing Struct Members Initializing Structs Recap: Student Data Struct

10Enums and Typedef

enum for Named Constants Declaring and Using Enums Enums in Switch Statements Using typedef for Type Aliases typedef with Structs Recap: Typedef & Enum Practice