Please explain this to me
I was working on a white space compacting program, and I came up with this code which seems to work nicely:
Code:
#include <stdio.h>
/* replace_blanks.c - September 29, 2003
* by Rob Somers
* An answer to exercise 1-9 in K&R II
* If the character is a space, print it, then
* check the next character, and if it is a space,
* delete the previous space, and print the new one
*/
int main(void)
{
int c;
while( ( c = getchar() ) != EOF ) {
if( ( c == ' ' ) ){
putchar( c );
while( ( c = getchar() ) == ' ' ){
printf( "\b " );
}
}
putchar( c );
}
return 0;
}
However, I was flipping through K&R2 and I saw another way which I tried and it works:
Code:
#include <stdio.h>
/* replace_blanks_2.c - September 29, 2003
* by Rob Somers
* An answer to exercise 1-9 in K&R II
*/
int main(void)
{
int c;
while( ( c = getchar() ) != EOF ) {
if( ( c == ' ' ) ){
putchar( c );
while( ( c = getchar() ) == ' ' ){
;
}
}
putchar( c );
}
return 0;
}
Now why does the semi-colon work? (The semi-colon replaces the line in red on the first version) Is the while loop saying in effect, "If this condition, do nothing" ? So that way it prints no space after the initial space? The second version looks to be a better solution, not?
~/kermit
