How to prevent menus from glitching when scanf expects an int but receives characters (C)

Take for instance:

printf("Continue?\n>>");
scanf("%d", &cont);
getchar();

Normally I add the getchar() to prevent the program from infinite looping (reading off the '\n' character from the buffer). However, when used with a menu following this statement the extra characters are read in and any scanfs following the character input (up to the number of characters input) are skipped.

What I want to figure out is how to prevent it from skipping forward through several sections开发者_开发百科 of my program when it reads in a type of input other than an int. Would this be best solved by putting it inside of a loop that won't continue until the variable is in the expected domain?

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Consider using fgets and sscanf instead. Load a line's worth of input, then parse only that line instead of the entire stdin.

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Check the value returned by scanf. The return value indicates the number variables that were assigned to. If you're expecting an int and the user types in a character, scanf should return zero.

Try including a "%*s" input specifier. See http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdio/scanf/

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Instead of reading an integer, just read a string and convert it to a number (atoi). Two problems that may occur:

1. Char buffer not big enough. To prevent this you can read char by char from the input and realloc the buffer if necessary.
2. String is not a number. Atoi will return some default value (0 or -1, don't remember). You just have to check the string somehow.