I HATE string manipulation in C

[Little 10 Toes]

Still remember the saying Pascal is a water pistol aimed at everyone while C/C++ is a .357 aimed at your head.

 

[JonnyFive]

Actually, it's an additional 2-year-hold hung on the side of the 3-year-old. And you know that the maturity of a 3-year-old plus the maturity of a 2-year-old does not equal the maturity of a 5-year-old.

I just nominated this: it's a perfect comparison.

 

[zooterkin]

I would suggest that you move the logic that decides which destination string to put the result in out of the function and make it a generic function that just modifies the string it is passed in-place.

Something like this:
...

I was going to follow up on my previous post when I had time to point out any further errors, but as jsiv has posted an elegant solution my advice would be to read that and understand it as it epitomises the C approach to coding (I mean that in a good way ).

 

[aggle-rithm]

Why are you using C strings in a C++ program? Why not use the STL String support?

When I programmed in C++, I used C strings in low-level structures and string objects in user interfaces. This is partly because much of the existing code when I started working there was in C, so I wanted to make the coding style consistent. Also, I liked being able to manipulate strings in the same manner as I did byte arrays from binary data.

Pointer arithmetic was my favorite thing.

 

[69dodge]

[...] it's fixed. But I don't know why since my change was to fix a different problem in InsertWord.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Did you change RemoveWord at all, or just InsertWord?

The version of RemoveWord that you posted does contain a bug: The only word of a one-word string is the last word of the string, but it is not preceded by a space. The function assumes that it is, backs charpoint up past the beginning of the string, and then writes a '\0' there. Oops.

This works:

/* Remove the nth word from the string s.  (n is 0-based.)

   Each word contains a single space, as its last character,
   except possibly for the string's last word, which might
   not contain any spaces.

   Example:
   n:  0   1  2 3 45  6
   s: "abc de f g  hi jkl"
*/
void remove(char *s, int n) {
   char *b, *e;  // beginning and one-past-end of word to be removed

   for (b = s; *b && n; ++b)
      if (*b == ' ') --n;

   for (e = b; *e && *e++ != ' ';);

   // when removing last word, remove preceding space too, if any
   if (!*e && s<b && b<e) --b;

   strcpy(b, e);
}

 

[jsiv]

I guess there's a reason MacOS was written in PASCAL up through System 7.

<---- Skeptical.

 

[greymatters]

I appreciate the thought, but it's fixed. But I don't know why since my change was to fix a different problem in InsertWord. Glad to know I'm not the only programmer who finds pointers annoying. I guess there's a reason MacOS was written in PASCAL up through System 7.

Actually, everything through System 6 was written entirely in assembly language. The new features that were added for System 7 were written in Pascal.