Question about strcat

I have to write a program. Its basically a "random self book writer".

It uses random number generation to write sentences. It has 4 arrays of strings which are the databank for the words the program picks to construct the sentence. I'm nearly done with it, but there is one requirement I'm having problems with.

The program needs to concatenate each word to the previous word in a seperate array large enough to hold the entire sentence. The only function I know of that can do this is strcat. I'm having problems concatenating the words using strcat. I need some help. Here is what I made so far.

Code:

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

int main( void )
{

        int word1, word2, word3, word4;

        char *article[] = { "The", "A", "One", "Some", "Any" };
        char *noun[] = { "boy", "girl", "dog", "town", "car" };
        char *verb[] = { "drove", "jumped", "ran", "walked", "skipped" };
        char *preposition[] = { "to.", "from.", "over.", "under.", "on." };
        char sentence[50]= "";

        srand( time(0) );

        word1=  rand() &#37; 5;
        word2= rand() % 5;
        word3= rand() % 5;
        word4= rand() % 5;




        printf("%s\n", strcat(sentence,article[word1], noun[word2] ));

        return 0;

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strcat() doesn't work like that; you can't provide multiple strings to tack on to the end. All it can do is take one string and add another, single string to the end.

You could call strcat() multiple times; or use sprintf(). sprintf() is more analogous to what you appear to be trying to do.

Do be careful. Neither strcat() nor sprintf() will check whether you're writing too much data to your target and bad things will happen if you do so!

Maybe something like
printf("%s %s\n", article[word1], noun[word2]);

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Elysia

Maybe something like
printf("%s %s\n", article[word1], noun[word2]);

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Yea that works, but this is in the chapter on string and character functions. It doesn't really concatenate them, so my professor might not be satisfied. I will try sprintf()

size_t sentence_length = sizeof sentence;
size_t article_length = sizeof article[word1];
size_t noun_length = sizeof noun[word2];

strncat( sentence, article[word1], sentence_length > article_length ? article_length : sentence_length - 1 );
sentence_length -= article_length;
strncat( sentence, noun[word2], sentence_length > noun_length ? noun_length : sentence_length - 1 );

Quote:

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Originally Posted by citizen

size_t sentence_length = sizeof sentence;
size_t article_length = sizeof article[word1];
size_t noun_length = sizeof noun[word2];

strncat( sentence, article[word1], sentence_length > article_length ? article_length : sentence_length - 1 );
sentence_length -= article_length;
strncat( sentence, noun[word2], sentence_length > noun_length ? noun_length : sentence_length - 1 );

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Never mind, it works much better with sprintf(), but thanks. Concatenate means to join words together, and sprintf() does that as well.