Passing a character array to a function

Hi all,

I'm new to the boards and new to C, working my way through K&R and I've become stuck on exercise 1-18. I've used a function to place an input line into a character array named line. main then attempts to pass the array to a new function, which is currently supposed to simply print the string (it'll do more later) - yet the string doesn't print.

I suspect that the array in the second function isn't pointing to the correct mem location but I can't see what I'm doing wrong. I'd really appreciate any tips!!

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#define MAXLINE 1000 /* max line length */

int getline(char s[], int maxline);
void remspac(char t[], int len);

/* Remove trailing whitespace from lines & remove blank lines */
main()
{
  int len; /* line length */
  char line[MAXLINE];

  while ((len = getline(line, MAXLINE)) > 0)
    ;
  remspac(line, len);

  return 0;
}

/* getline: reads a line into s, and returns the length (i) */
int getline(char s[], int lim)
{
  int i, c;
  for (i = 0; i < lim - 1 && (c=getchar()) != EOF && c!='\n'; ++i)
    s[i] = c;
  if (c == '\n') {
    s[i] = c;
    ++i;
  }
  s[i] = '\0';
  if (s[i-2] == ' ')
    printf("Trailing space\n");

  return i;
}

void remspac(char t[], int len)
{
    printf("%s", t);
}

You start at index 0 every time getline() is called and you set len to that. So len in main() will only contain the length of the last string getline() reads in and the line will only consist of those characters. So if you type in MAXLINE+5 characters, the line will only have the last 5 that you typed. That's probably not what you want.

Also, you can only break out of the input cycle by sending EOF. If you just press ENTER without typing anything before it, getline() will return 1 and then getline() is called again by main(). Is that what you were aiming for? If so, don't even test for '\n' because it seems pretty meaningless in its current implementation.

I'm not sure what the goal of exercise 1-18 is. If I knew that then I could probably help more.

You start at index 0 every time getline() is called and you set len to that. So len in main() will only contain the length of the last string getline() reads in and the line will only consist of those characters. So if you type in MAXLINE+5 characters, the line will only have the last 5 that you typed. That's probably not what you want.

Ah, so I should be calling remspac within the while loop that that generates line - I knew that but just messed up, seems to be genertaing the right result now but I'll need to check further.

Also, you can only break out of the input cycle by sending EOF. If you just press ENTER without typing anything before it, getline() will return 1 and then getline() is called again by main(). Is that what you were aiming for? If so, don't even test for '\n' because it seems pretty meaningless in its current implementation.

The code currently doesn't do a lot as I couldn't pass the array around, I should have removed the check for \n. Shouldn't getline return 2 for a blank line anyway? I thought the two characters would be \n and \0

[EDIT] - Oooooops, it will return 1 - there will be a \0 but it's not counted by len.[/EDIT]


The purpose of the exercise is to remove trailing whitespace (blanks and tabs) from lines, and delete blank lines (sorry, I should probably have stated this!!!). I should be ok if I've got the array moving around correctly but I'll post back if I come across further problems.

Thanks a lot for the help!!!!

Yeah, you've got the array moving around correctly. The problem is just with what getline() does and the while() loop in which you're calling it.