Thread: Beginner: Copy from 1 file to another, excluding spaces.

Hi,
I'm trying to write a program that will ask the user for a file which the wish to copy the contents of and then copy it to another file whilst stripping out the spaces.

but initially i cant seem to be able to get it to copy at all, my window crashes on entering the output file name. can anyone suggest where im going wrong?

Code:

#include<stdio.h>

 int main(void)
 {
	/* Declare Variables */ 
	char inputFile[20];
	char outputFile[20];
	char copy[256];
	

	/* Ask user to input file name(including extension)*/
	printf("Please enter the file name you want to copy: ");
	scanf("%s", inputFile);

	/* Ask user to output file name(including extension)*/
	printf("Please enter the file name you want to output: ");
	scanf("%s", outputFile);

	/* Opens file on a read txt only basis */
	FILE *file_pointer=NULL;
	file_pointer=fopen(inputFile, "rt");

	/* Opens file on a write basis */
	FILE *file_pointer2=NULL;
	file_pointer2=fopen(outputFile, "w");

	/* Copies the string into a buffer named 'copy' */
	 while (fgets(copy,256,file_pointer));
	{
		fputs(copy,file_pointer2);
	}
	
	/* A declaration of success */
	printf("File %s has been successfully copied to file %s", inputFile, outputFile);

 }

Kind Regards
Ryan

If you're stripping all spaces, a simpler method would be to process the file character by character. Then you can simply see if the current character is a space and refrain from writing it if so:

Code:

int ch;

while ((ch = getc(in)) != EOF) {
    if (ch == ' ')
        putc(ch, out);
}

The way you're doing it now would require trimming spaces from a string, which isn't terribly difficult, but quite a bit harder than the above if you're a beginner.

>the only this i had to change was the if (ch == ' ') to if (ch != ' ')
Ha! My bad. I originally used isspace and figured that probably would be too much, then replaced it with the wrong manual test. Gotta pay more attention to what I'm doing...