stdio.h discard a line from input

There are a few different ways to phrase this question, all relating to stdio.h input handling:

• What is a better way to discard input other than using fgetc() to read it character by character?
  
• How do I discard a line without using fgets() to store it first? It may not clear the line completely due to limited buffer size.

Through creative uses of scanf() this can be done. The format string of scanf() looks like printf(). Rather than passing the value to be printed, you pass a pointer to some memory location to store the value that is parsed. In addition, you can use an astrisk '*' modifier to tell scanf() to discard input.

The first try, scanf("%*s\n"), doesn't really quite do what we wanted. The format "%s" matches only non-white characters (space, tab, newline, etc), so we only discard up to the nearest white space. The "\n" eats another white space (not a newline, contrary to intuition).

The Glibc version^* of scanf can match a sequence of characters of any length given character ranges in brackets, sort of like POSIX regular expression character classes. The matching does not care about white spaces, so scanf("%*[^\n]") discards all non-newline characters from the input. But that doesn't quite do the trick yet. The input buffer still has a newline character.

Finally, scanf("%*[^\n]\n") does the trick. It first discards all characters leading to a newline, then discards a white character which must be a new line.

^*Update: appears to be ANSI C3.159-1989, so this feature should be portable to any conforming implementations. AIX has it. BSD has it. Glibc is the only one I tried.