Thread: strcmp, a problem with capital letters

Hey all,

I'm basically in the process of sorting words in a text file. As it currently stands everything is working, however it seems that words beginning with a capital letter are placed before lowercase letters, regardless of their position in the alphabet (I'm guessing this is because of the byte size).

Was just wondering if there were any easy solutions available? I'm guessing the easiest alternative would be to make all the words lower or upper cases, but after searching google and trying strlwr and tolower, neither of the functions worked

Any help welcome,
Thanks.

if everything was working then you wouldnt have a problem right?

are you only using 'strcmp' to compare the strings? do you realize that: 'A' < 'a'? refer to the ASCII table for more info on that.

Originally Posted by laserlight

No, but as Salem mentioned you can use tolower(), which works on characters, to write a function to convert strings to lowercase.

ah, good to know for future reference, thanks

I'm aware that 'A' < 'a' with regards to binary, but was under the impression that strcmp() would compensate for the correction in general English (e.g 'B' > 'a').

strcmp() does a lexigraphical comparison, not an alphabetical comparison. If you want it to compensate, you have to write your own function that does it.

Is there a function that can permanently convert a string to lower case?

Yes, you can check your compiler for _strlwr or something like that. Most compilers will have a comparable function that converts a string to lower case. But according to people here, you have to write your own portable function because anything nonportable is evil and anyone who suggests using something nonportable is stupid. At least this time it's easy:

Code:

char *strLower( char *str ) {
  char *temp;

  for ( temp = str; *temp; temp++ ) {
    *temp = tolower( *temp );
  }

  return str;
}

I could, but I get jumped on even if I write something portable that someone doesn't like. So I'll just hedge my bets and hope my style isn't nitpicked.

You're just being whiny.

Yeah, I know. The way I see it, all I can do is have fun with it. You guys expect me to be perfect according to your standards, but your standards are impossible to predict and it's impossible to be perfect. So if I'm going to get flamed in public and in private no matter what I do, I'll at least enjoy myself.