Almost Daily Contest #4

[Prelude]

For Everyone

Given an array of strings in the form of a word search game, write a function:

int wordSearch(const char **tab, const char *word, int *indices);

That finds any occurance of 'word' in the table 'tab'. The function will return 0 if the word does not exist in the table and 1 if the word is found. The two-dimensional indices of the word will be placed in the array 'indices'. The list of indices will be terminated by an invalid index, -1.

Words can be found forward, backward, up, down, and diagonal in any direction. You may assume that all input will be correct and valid with the exception of a word not being present.

Example:
Given the following declarations:

char *tab[] = {
    "abcde",
    "bcdef",
    "caefg",
    "dtfgh",
    "efghi",
    ""
};

int indices[11] = {-1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1};

the function call wordSearch(tab, "cat", indices); will return 1 and indices will contain the following: {1,1,2,1,3,1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1}

Testing Categories
Code brevity. The smallest source file (in number of characters) with correct output wins.

Contest Ends: Wednesday, August 27, 2003

[Sang-drax]

Will you ignore whitespace and new lines when counting characters?

[Prelude]

>Will you ignore whitespace and new lines when counting characters?
The table will contain only letters in the latin alphabet, case sensitive. The string to be searched for will be the same.

[Sang-drax]

I meant when counting the characters in the submitted source code.

[Prelude]

>I meant when counting the characters in the submitted source code.
Oh. Yes, whitespace counts.

[confuted]

Prelude, I'm not sure that's such a good idea :P People are going to use #defines and random obfuscation tricks now. ...At least, I would, if I was going to try this

[Prelude]

>People are going to use #defines and random obfuscation tricks now.
That's fine. No matter how much you crush your code down, the truly elegant solutions will still be smaller.

[Magos]

I'm a little confused about the index array. When the word is found, will the location for the letters be stored in the index array? Like: X1, Y1, X2, Y2, X3, Y3 etc...?

When counting the characters (of the source file), is it only the characters found in the function? If it includes the entire file, can we leave int and return 0 out of main to reduce the size? ^^

[Magos]

Originally posted by Salem
> is it only the characters found in the function?
Well I'm just going to post a function with the defined interface.

Yes, that may be wise. On the other hand, Prelude may claim that it is "uncompilable"...

[Iamien]

I'm a bit confused,
is the table going to contain what was defined above, or is it a user inputed.
thanks

[Speedy5]

And also, is it fixed length to that size?

[Speedy5]

:: double post, sorry ::

[Sang-drax]

I assumed that the table could be variable in size.

[Speedy5]

Oh I see, the empty string at the end. But will all the rows have the same number of characters?

[Sang-drax]

I have already submitted my entry - I haven't time to work on it later anyway. I assumed that all lines were of equal size.