Trouble with a lab

It really depends on what all your fomatting rules are.

I don't understand exactly how you know when you are missing a month.
Sometimes there are 2 spaces between two values sometimes 3.

If 2 spaces means you are missing one month what does 3 spaces mean?

Anyway, I would step through character by character and decide what you need to do. Of course you'll have to modify this fit your rules

Code:

    while( (fscanf( input, "%c", &holder ) != EOF) )
    {
        if(holder == ',')  //replace comma with tab
        {
            fprintf( output, "%c", '\t' );
            prev_holder = holder;
        }
        else if(prev_holder == ' ' && holder == ' ')  // two consecutive spaces, replace 2nd with asterick
        {
            fprintf( output, "%c", '*' );
            prev_holder = '*';
            //if 3 spaces means missing 2 months, which I'm guessing it does, this instead
            //fprintf( output, "%s", "* " );
            //prev_holder = holder; //can be moved outside if statments since always the same
        }
        else
        {
            fprintf( output, "%c", holder );  //just print the character
            prev_holder = holder;
        }
    }

spydoor, I agree with you entirely. The way the input file was given to me, with all these jumbled up spaces and with a poor description, was confusing at best.

What you provided is a great solution. Thank you for that. I was overlooking the fact that char printing will print each number of the float, so I didn't need to worry about printing the whole float at once.

I've got a final question, and this is more for my understanding of what you showed me. In the else if statement, using "%s" and then double-quotes (instead of singles) around the asterik... what is that? I was only aware of %d, %c, and %f and their modifiers.

single quotes are used for single characters

double quotes are used for a string of characters.
%s is the modifier for strings.

In this case I did asterick followed by space. Since it is more than one character, double quotes and %s were required.

If you'd rather not use %s you can always do to two calls to fprintf

Code:

fprintf( output, "%c", '*' );
fprintf( output, "%c", ' ' );

Once again I'm making assumptions about the formatting you need. Just guessing you'd want a space after each asterick.

Thanks spydoor, that was the formatting I needed. And thanks to everyone else who added their input. I learned more with this one than any of the other labs.