Explanation of Article on Scanf ()

[Ron N]

The C++ reference article has this passage in it:

Non-whitespace character, except percentage signs (%): Any character that is not either a whitespace character (blank, newline or tab) or part of a format specifier (which begin with a % character) causes the function to read the next character from stdin, compare it to this non-whitespace character and if it matches, it is discarded and the function continues with the next character of format.

How can a a non-format character match the data type of an input character? If it did match, it would then have to be a format character. Also, if it did match, why would you then discard the character? Maybe a definition of the term "match" would be helpful to clarify the issue.

[hanst99]

I don't use C functions myself, but it appears that with a file like this:

value: 5

and a prog like this:

int i;
scanf(file, "value: %d", &i);
fprintf(stdio,"%d", i);

the output would be

5

Note that I didn't test this, just try it yourself.