I believe C should add the modulo operator for pointers, to query how many bytes after a given alignment boundary a pointer is, or 0 if the pointer is aligned to the boundary.
Sounds like a reason to use a raw binary format instead of something that requires sscanf but yeah I do not really understand what else sscanf is good for once all the parameters were read. An early return would be more efficient.
@supercat I kind of disagree with using that as a reason to not optimize all the code. For example, in a game, of course the render loop is more performance-sensitive than the initialization code, but still, long loading screens can be annoying.