Alphabetizing Lines of Text

I am supposed to take the contents of 1 text document and output it into another by have the lines alphabetized.

Your program should:
– open the file input.txt
– read all the lines in input.txt into an array of C-strings
– sort the array using bubble sort
– write the resulting sorted array to the file output.txt

You may assume:
– the file input.txt exists and contains at least one line
– input.txt contains less than 10000 lines
– each line in input.txt is less than 200 characters long

If the program is run as follows:

a8 test1.txt test2.out

And test1.txt contains:
zz
xx
yy
cc
ww
aa

Then the file test2.out should contain:
aa
cc
ww
xx
yy
zz

So far I am able to get it to copy to the output file, but now I need to figure out how to alphabetize them.

My code so far:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#define LINESIZE	200
#define MAXNUMBER	10000

void copyByChar(char * p_inFileName, char * p_outFileName)
{
	FILE * p_fileIn = fopen(p_inFileName, "r" );

	FILE * p_fileOut = fopen(p_outFileName, "w" );

	char myChar = fgetc(p_fileIn);


	while (myChar != EOF)
	{
		fputc(myChar, p_fileOut );
		myChar = fgetc(p_fileIn);
	}

	fclose(p_fileIn);
	fclose(p_fileOut);

}




int main (int argc, char ** argv)
{
	copyByChar(argv[1], argv[2]);

}

We are advised to use bubblesort:

Code:

void bubbleSort ( unsigned int a[], int len)
{
	int i;
	int j;
	
	for (i = 0; i < len; i++ )
	{
		for (j = len - 1; j > i; j--)
		{
			if (a[j-1] > a[j])
			{
				unsigned int tmp = a[j-1];
				a[j-1] = a[j];
				a[j] = tmp;
			}
		}
	}
}

However, I'm not sure what steps I should take next to begin alphabetizing each line. I will also have to make sure I read past the first character if both lines start with the same character. I can use strcpy, but I'm not sure how to implement it.

Thanks for any help.

Use strcmp() to compare strings. It handles the comparison for you so bubblesort (or any other sorting algorithm) will work.

Originally Posted by MacGyver

Use strcmp() to compare strings. It handles the comparison for you so bubblesort (or any other sorting algorithm) will work.

Alright, that's what I was expecting to do. How would I get each line of text into an area where I can use the bubblesort process on them? I know each character is being read, but I'm not sure how to recall all those characters and then refer to each line as a separate array of characters. For instance, if I were to make a bubblesort function, where would I call it, and what parameters would I bring up into the function.

Thanks

Read each line of the file into a char array, say

char lines[100][20];

Check for NULL after fopen, because it can fail! If it fails, your app will crash!
And secondly, since all those characters are sorted by line, I suggest you read the contents line-by-line into a 2D array like Salem suggests. Then you can sort them and print them back.

Alright, a 2d array would make sense, thanks a lot.