Lines 87–90 in the switch
statement of Fig. 5.10 cause the program to skip newline, tab and blank characters. Reading characters one at a time can cause problems. To have the program read the characters, we must send them to the computer by pressing the Enter key. This places a newline character in the input after the character we wish to process. Often, this newline character must be specially processed. By including these case
s in our switch
statement, we prevent the error message in the default
case from being printed each time a newline, tab or space is encountered in the input.