NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c-part1/6700

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 3.3 KB

Path: ix.netcom.com!netnews
From: Norman Bullen <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Ability to locate spaces?
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 15:44:05 -0800
Organization: Black Cat Associates
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: ple-ca7-18.ix.netcom.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-NETCOM-Date: Sat Feb 17  4:01:10 PM PST 1996
X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Win16; I)

Syed Zaeem Hosain wrote:
>
> In article <[e-mail]>, John
Young Oh <[e-mail]> writes:
> >I am trying to write a program that reads an input file and locates where
> >the spaces are located. For example, if a line from the input file read:
> >555555.55    5555.55   5555.55
> >
> >I would like the program to be able to recognize that there are spaces
> >between the numbers and keep track of them. What I did was to use
> >fgets and read in the line into a string. I then used a for loop
> >and checked each array element of the character string and used an
> >if statement to see if an array element was a space.
> >Here are the lines of code:
> >
> >FILE *input;
> >char *string, buf[200];
> >int i, count;
> >input = fopen ("data", "r");
> >(etc etc etc)
> >string = fgets (buf, 199, input);
> >for (i = 0; i < 40; ++i)
> >{
> >       if (buf[i] == ' ')
> >       {
> >               ++count;
> >       }
> >}
> >
> >What is wrong with this code? It does not seem to work.
>
> Well, what did the program do? What is the error? Is it a compiler
> problem or a run-time problems? "Does not seem to work" is pretty darn
> vague, in other words!  :-)
>
> Here is what I would check:
>
> 1. Did you initialize count to 0 before the lines get read?
>
> 2. Did you check to see if fgets returns a legit result? I.e.  the line
> has something to read?
>
> 3. Is the line longer than 40 characters? If so, why does your loop
> stop at 40 characters? Why not use the `\n` byte as a terminator for
> the loop? Or the '\0' byte for that matter?
>
> 4. Are the lines longer than 199 characters? If so, why is your "buf"
> size set to 200?
>
> 5. Did the call to "fopen" succeed? Are you reading real lines from
> the input program?
>
> 6. Is the filename correct? Does the file called "data" exist?
>
> There may be other issues, but these are the ones that come to mind off
> the top of my head since I do not know the symptoms you are actually
> seeing when running the program.
>
> As an aside: your first sentence says "... locates where the spaces are
> located".  Later you say "recognize that there are spaces ...  and keep
> track of them". What are you really trying to do - simply count them or
> something else?
>
>                                                                 Z
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------> | Syed Zaeem Hosain          P. O. Box 610097            [phone] |
> | Z Consulting Group        San Jose, CA 95161             [e-mail] |
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
The spaces that you see in the file may actually be tab characters or
other "whitespace" characters. Instead of
       if (buf[i] == ' ')
try
       if (isspace(buf[i]))